Research on longitudinal following control of intelligent fleet based on communication delay compensation

In order to proffer a solution for the problems associated with poor fleet control caused by communication delay, this study proposes a smart longitudinal following control solution, such as using a hierarchical longitudinal control structure which the upper control solves the controlled vehicle’s desired acceleration with the model prediction control algorithm, and the lower control provides the engine throttle opening angle based on the desired acceleration or achieves the acceleration/ braking of the controlled vehicle according to the braking pressure. Moreover, considering the systematic communication delay, the Kalman filter-based communication delay compensation algorithm is further proposed to compensate the vehicle state, and realize the stable tracking of the vehicle distance by providing vehicle state feedback for the model predictive control algorithm. Then, the corresponding control effect is verified through the CARSIM/SIMULINK joint simulation platform. The simulation test results showed that the proposed method which takes the communication delay into consideration can significantly improve the following performance of the intelligent fleet as well as improve its safety.