Control of vehicle platoons for highway safety and efficient utility: Consensus with communications and vehicle dynamics

Platoon formation of highway vehicles is a critical foundation for autonomous or semiautonomous vehicle control for enhanced safety, improved highway utility, increased fuel economy, and reduced emission toward intelligent transportation systems. Platoon control encounters great challenges from vehicle control, communications, team coordination, and uncertainties. This paper introduces a new method for coordinated control of platoons by using integrated network consensus decisions and vehicle control. To achieve suitable coordination of the team vehicles based on terrain and environmental conditions, the emerging technology of network consensus control is modified to a weighted and constrained consensus seeking framework. Algorithms are introduced and their convergence properties are established. The methodology employs neighborhood information through on-board sensors and V2V or V2I communications, but achieves global coordination of the entire platoon. The ability of the methods in terms of robustness, disturbance rejection, noise attenuation, and cyber-physical interaction is analyzed and demonstrated with simulated case studies.