Optimal Connected Cruise Control Design with Stochastic Communication Delays

Connected cruise control (CCC) is an emerging technique which can significantly improve vehicle's connectivity, safety, and energy efficiency. In the CCC system, wireless V2V communication plays a key role in sharing a large amount of reliable information among vehicles, along with unavoidable delays causing instability in the controller design. In this paper, an optimal control algorithm for the CCC vehicle is proposed in the presence of stochastic communication delays. First, the vehicle dynamics is formulated by using the car-following model, and then the discrete-time platoon model is formulated. With the objective of minimizing vehicle's state errors as well as reducing energy consumption, an optimization problem is formulated with a quadratic cost function. The optimal control strategy is iteratively solved by using a backward recursion to realize vehicle's close-loop control under the influence of stochastic time delays. In particular, the control gain can be calculated offline, and the real-time control signals are determined online based on the system states. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is verified by numerical simulations.