A Joint Control–Communication Design for Reliable Vehicle Platooning in Hybrid Traffic

Recent studies have shown that traffic safety and efficiency can be substantially improved by vehicle platooning, in which vehicles periodically broadcast their kinetic status to neighbors, known as beacon message dissemination. As a networked control system, vehicle platoon has attracted significant attention from both the control and networking areas. However, few studies consider the practical traffic scenario with both platoons and individual vehicles, and the proposed beaconing schemes lack the deep understanding of relationship between the beaconing performance and the requirements of the control mechanism. To address these challenging issues, we propose a joint control-communication design to achieve reliable vehicle platooning in a more realistic traffic scenario, wherein the traffic consists of both platoons and individual vehicles, and both periodic beacon messages and event-based safety messages shall be delivered together. Specifically, we first develop a comprehensive control-theoretical analysis to understand how the vehicular communication can affect features of platoon driving; based on the understanding, we then propose and analyze an adaptive platoon-based message dissemination scheme; finally, we conduct extensive numerical experiments to validate the effectiveness of the protocol and to confirm the accuracy of the our theoretical analysis.