Collaborative Platooning of Automated Vehicles Using Variable Time-Gaps

Connected automated vehicles (CAVs) could potentially be coordinated to safely attain the maximum traffic flow on roadways under dynamic traffic patterns, such as those engendered by the merger of two strings of vehicles due a lane drop. Strings of vehicles have to be shaped correctly in terms of the inter-vehicular time-gap and velocity to ensure that such operation is feasible. However, controllers that can achieve such traffic shaping over the multiple dimensions of target time-gap and velocity over a region of space are unknown. The objective of this work is to design such a controller, and to show that we can design candidate time-gap and velocity profiles such that it can stabilize the string of vehicles in attaining the target profiles. Our analysis is based on studying the system in the spacial rather than the time domain, which enables us to study stability as in terms of minimizing errors from the target profile and across vehicles as a function of location. Finally, we conduct numeral simulations in the context of shaping two platoons for merger, which we use to illustrate how to select time-gap and velocity profiles for maximizing flow and maintaining safety.