Distributed Control Design based on Multi-Agent for Distributed Driving Electric Vehicle

This paper proposes a distributed control method for path-tracking of distributed driving electric vehicle (DDEV). We establish the architecture of DDEV based on multi-agent system (MAS), where subsystems of chassis are treated as agents. To ensure the performance of tracking, we adopt distributed model predictive control (DMPC) theory to design the controller. The main novelty of this paper lies in that the steering agent and driving/braking agent involved in path-tracking can compute respectively with less information exchanging and complete a common target for the operation of DDEV. This parallel computing architecture reduces the complexity of computation and provides scalability for controllers of DDEV. Comparison between DMPC and traditional MPC demonstrate that the efficiency of tracking has been improved greatly. This paper is also expected to motivate the exploration of control methods for DDEV.