Analysis of Communication Demands of Networked Control Systems for Autonomous Platooning

In autonomous platooning of vehicles, robust Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) systems are required for guaranteeing reliable and stable driving performance. Cruise control systems should meet two requirements: prevent collisions between vehicles in any event and prevent amplification of distance errors along the platoon. The absence of one of these requirements causes weak road utilization and fuel efficiency and eventually leads to decreased safety. By usage of suitable control system parameters and deployment of appropriate means of communication between members of a platoon, these risks may be minimized. In this research, an evaluation platform for stability and risk-of-collision of autonomous vehicle platoons is developed. It allows for performance analysis for a large range of controller specifications and network characteristics by extensive simulation based on real-world vehicle parameters. The experiments show platoon performance limits caused by communication constraints and control system specifications. First results suggest that the choice of controller parameters strongly affects communication system requirements. Larger distances and more aggressive controller gains can reduce demands on the radio link to a great extent. The contribution of this work is twofold: firstly, platoon performance of correlated network errors is evaluated broadly and secondly, performance dependencies between communication limitations and the control design are shown.