Networked Model for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

Abstract This paper proposes a cooperative adaptive cruise control model, adding a communication network structure to an existing model that has been shown to capture real commercial adaptive cruise control vehicle behavior. The proposed model is interesting because it only requires minimal information sharing, facilitating the creation of platoons comprised of vehicles from different manufacturers. We prove the stability of the model and discuss string stability. Algorithms for estimating the velocity of the vehicles locally and for estimating the velocities of all the vehicles in the platoon are presented. We simulate vehicle platoon control with the lead vehicle following an experimentally collected trajectory, showing that adding communication can cause a string unstable platoon to become stable.