Prediction-based Transmission-Control Codesign for Vehicle Platooning

The advancements in automation and vehicular communication have enabled the platoon systems. The vehicles in a platoon are dynamically decoupled but constrained by spatial geometry. To coordinate decisions and act cooperatively, information sharing among vehicles is required, which means the platooning problem involves both communication and control issues. We consider a communication resource-aware control problem for platoon systems in this paper. To provide desirable driving performances and flexible communication scheduling opportunities for platoon systems, the distributed model predictive control (DMPC) method and communication trigger mechanism are jointly designed, which yields the communication-aware DMPC (CA-DMPC) algorithm. Simulations have been conducted to demonstrate the satisfactory control performances and significant communication savings.