Event-Based Control and Scheduling of a Platoon of Vehicles in VANETs

This paper investigates the vehicular platoon control problem subject to variable communication delays, packets disorder, access constraints and resource constraints in vehicular and hoc networks (VANETs). Using a novel representation of the network delays as an uncertain variable belonging to the different bounded intervals, the discrete-time variable sampling interval platoon model is established with communication constraints. An event-based control and scheduling (EBCS) codesign strategy that can robustly stabilize the platoon system is given. Based on this model and a guaranteed performance cost function, the aforementioned problem is formulated as an LMI optimization problem, which can guarantee the Global Uniform Practical Stability (GUPS). A numerous simulation and experiments with laboratory scale Arduino cars show the efficiency and practicability of the proposed methods.