Stability and Fuel Economy of Nonlinear Vehicle Platoons: A Distributed Economic MPC Approach

This paper proposes a novel distributed economic model predictive control (EMPC) strategy with guaranteed stability and fuel economy for a nonlinear vehicle platoon subject to the state and control constraints. In order to minimize the fuel consumption of the vehicle platoon, a Lyapunov-based contractive constraint is imposed into the distributed economic MPC optimization problem to establish recursive feasibility and stability. A γ -gain stability condition is further derived to ensure the neighbor γ -gain stability of the vehicle platoon control system. Some simulation results indicate that the vehicle platoon can be achieved a stringent formation, γ -gain stability and better economic performance under the proposed control strategy.