Exploiting Heterogeneity in the Decentralised Control of Platoons

This paper investigates the use of decentralised control architectures with heterogeneous dynamics for improving performance in large-scale systems. Our focus is on two well-known decentralised approaches; the ‘predecessor following’ and ‘bidirectional’ architectures for vehicle platooning. The former, utilising homogeneous control dynamics, is known to face exponential growth in disturbance amplification throughout the platoon, resulting in poor scalability properties. We demonstrate that by incorporating heterogeneous control system dynamics, this limitation disappears entirely, even under bandwidth constraints. Furthermore, we reveal that introducing heterogeneity in the bidirectional architecture allows the platoon's behaviour to be rendered independent of its length, allowing for highly scalable performance.