Development of a Robust Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control With Dynamic Topology

This research proposed a robust Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) to overcome the shortcoming of the existing CACC controllers in dealing with unexpected events, such as malware attack, phishing attack, and DNS tunneling attack, where perception and data received via communication contradict with the reality. The proposed controller combines the advantage of two information flow topologies – All-Predecessor Following (APF) and Predecessor-Leader Following (PLF) control methods – to improve the capability of CACC platoons. The string stability of the proposed CACC controller was proven. The robustness to time delay switch (TDS) attacks was assessed using simulation. The normal cruise was simulated to show the capability of the proposed controller in a wide range of speeds. TDS attacks, which encompassed four different unexpected events, were tested to verify the robustness of the proposed CACC. Results confirmed that the proposed CACC controller is string stable and robust against these TDS attacks without crashing or causing jerks. It also showed that the proposed CACC controller outperformed a state-of-the-art CACC controller.