Distributed Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons Under Uncertainty

This paper presents a novel distributed nonlinear model predictive control (DNMPC) for minimizing velocity tracking and spacing errors in heterogeneous vehicle platoon under uncertainty. The vehicle longitudinal dynamics and information flow in the platoon are established and analyzed. The algorithm of DNMPC with robustness and reliability considerations at each vehicle (or node) is developed based on the leading vehicle and reference information from nodes in its neighboring set. Together with the physical constraints on the control input, the nonlinear constraints on vehicle longitudinal dynamics, the terminal constraints on states, and the reliability constraints on both input and output, the objective function is defined to optimize the control accuracy and efficiency by penalizing the tracking errors between the predicted outputs and desirable outputs of the same node and neighboring nodes, respectively. Meanwhile, the robust design optimization model also minimizes the expected quality loss which consists of the mean and standard deviation of node inputs and outputs. The simulation results also demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed approach under two different traffic scenarios.