A novel distributed cooperative approach for mixed platoon consisting of connected and automated vehicles and human-driven vehicles

Abstract Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have the advantages of improving road safety, enhancing road utilization and reducing exhaust emissions. The CAVs will coexist with human-driven vehicles (HDVs) on the road for a longer period of time. This paper proposes a novel model to mimic the mixed platoon on basic freeway sections. An adaptive control model based on multi-agent system is proposed to model CAVs using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, and a similar form car-following model is utilized to describe HDVs. The adaptive consensus control and a more flexible, effective and practical spacing policy are embedded into the CAVs control model. Then a unified platoon model is established for the mixed platoon and a distributed cooperative approach is presented. We derive the stability conditions of the mixed platoon system. The performance of the mixed platoon model is numerically tested and verified under different scenarios such as different penetration rates of HDVs, different vehicle orders and different reaction-time delays of drivers.