Switched Control Strategies in Platooning With Dwell-Time-Based String Stability Guaranties

This letter analyzes the behavior of a platoon of vehicles in the presence of switches between two control modes: Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), based on local sensing, and Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), which incorporates vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication for improved coordination. Due to the V2V communications, CACC can maintain a shorter inter-vehicular distance, resulting in better performance of the platoon. On the other hand, ACC requires a larger inter-vehicular distance but is robust to degradations introduced by the communication network (time delay, packet loss, etc.). Switching between ACC and CACC can destabilize the platoon if not carefully managed, especially due to the modification of the inter-vehicular distance. To mitigate this, we develop $H_{\infty } $ specifications for a class of switching systems with lower-bounded state jumps. The proposed methodology requires solving an LMI for the controller design and a minimization problem to compute a lower-bound on the minimum dwell time between two switches. The proposed approach is validated through simulations.