Network and Control Co-Design for Heterogeneous CACC Systems Under Communication Constraints

In cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) using mobile wireless communication, communication constraints such as time delay and packet loss affect the stability of vehicle platooning control. Our previous study on a CACC system with vehicle position measurement proposed a network and control co-design approach that combined network priority control and communication disturbance observer (CDOB) to compensate for the communication constraints. However, the compensation performance of the CDOB was affected by the heterogeneity of vehicle dynamics as it was assumed that the homogeneous CACC system included only vehicles with identical dynamics. Thus, this study proposes the introduction of a disturbance observer (DOB) into the CACC system with the network and control co-design approach to suppress system disturbances such as modeling errors and address the heterogeneity issue. Simulations show that the proposed method compensates for the communication constrains even in the heterogeneous CACC system that includes vehicles with different time constants.