String Stability of a Vehicular Platoon With the Use of Macroscopic Information

Mesoscopic Controller for String Stability of Platoons With Disturbances

“…This paper extends the stability analysis of the mesoscopic traffic systems proposed in [10] and [11] to the case of disturbances d i ∈ [d min , d max ] acting on each vehicle; with d min < d max , d min , d max ∈ R. The disturbance term represents model uncertainties, unmodeled powertrain dynamics as the actuation delay, and external forces acting on the vehicle. Also the presence of human driven vehicles can be represented as a source of unknown disturbances for an autonomous vehicle, as we show in Section IV-C. Then, we refer to the concept of Disturbance String Stability that is defined in [15].…”

“…As in the framework presented in [10] and [11], we consider a variable spacing policy among the several ones presented in the literature (see [14], [29]). The classical definition of variable spacing policy is such that if a constant time headway is maintained between two consecutive vehicles, then the intervehicular distance increases proportionally with respect to it.…”

“…In particular, ψ i ∆p = ψ i ∆v = 0 means that the vehicles up to the i-th one have no oscillations. As in [11], we consider the macroscopic functions given in the following:…”

“…The present work is based on the framework developed in [10] and [11], and extends it to the case where disturbances act on each vehicle. A platoon of autonomous vehicles is considered, and a controller implementing a variable spacing policy exploiting macroscopic information is proposed.…”

“…A variable time spacing policy based on the shared macroscopic variables is defined, and stability of the platoon subject to external disturbances is proven by exploiting Input-to-State Stability (ISS) property in an inductive way. As in [10] and [11], the ISS property is ensured with respect to all the ahead leader-follower pairs of vehicles.…”