Hybrid modeling and control for a platoon maneuvers

Many physical systems today are modeled by interacting continuous and discrete states that influence the dynamic behavior. There has been an increasing interest in these types of systems during the last decade, mostly due to the growing use of computers in the control of physical processes. Hybrid system models, suitable for describing the essential dynamics of a fairly large class of physical systems in control engineering applications, contain both continuous dynamics and discrete dynamics. The authors discuss the design of efficient hybrid controllers for the platoon maneuvers on an automated highway system (AHS). For the modeling of a hybrid system including the merge and split operations, they introduce the safety distance policy for the merge and split operations. Then, the platoon system is modeled by a hybrid system. In addition, the hybrid controller for the proposed merge and split operation models are presented. Finally, they demonstrate their scenarios for platoon maneuvers using the hybrid control scheme.