On the Constrained CAV Platoon Control Problem

The main objective of the connected and automated vehicle (CAV) platoon control problem is to regulate CAVs' position while ensuring stability and accounting for vehicle dynamics. Although this problem has been studied in the literature, existing research has some limitations. This article presents two new theoretical results that address these limitations: the synthesis of unrealistic high-gain control parameters due to the lack of a systematic way to incorporate the lower and upper bounds on the control parameters, and the performance sensitivity to the communication delay due to inaccurate Taylor series approximation. To be more precise, taking advantage of the well-known Padé approximation, this article proposes a constrained CAV platoon controller synthesis that systematically incorporates the lower and upper bounds on the control parameters, and significantly improves the performance sensitivity to the communication delay. The effectiveness of the presented results is verified through conducting extensive numerical simulations. The proposed controller effectively attenuates the stop-and-go disturbance—a single cycle of deceleration followed by acceleration—amplification throughout the mixed platoon (consisting of CAVs and human-driven vehicles). Modern transportation systems will benefit from the proposed CAV controls in terms of effective disturbance attenuation as it will potentially reduce collisions.