Advances in Automobile Engineering
Open Access

Abstract

Demonstration of Disturbance Propagation in Traffic Flow for Enhancement of Vehicle Platoon Control System

Jinsoo Kim

Disturbance propagation and string stability of a large vehicle platoon that consists of a part of the traffic flow is closely related to traffic shockwaves and oscillation. In this respect, the concepts of the estimation and prediction of shockwave propagation speeds and congestion should be considered in order to establish a control strategy for safe conditions without collisions even when the congestion is amplified in an unstable string of the large platoon. This means that an advanced approach for a car-following control strategy, which includes a time delay and non-linearity terms, is necessary for the enhancement of Vehicle Platoon Control (VPC) and the system robustness. In this research, we have demonstrated the effect of the disturbance propagation phenomenon on traffic flow stability. The traffic flow shockwave and oscillation are interpreted in terms of both macroscopic and microscopic approaches. We also discuss how the phenomenon affects VPC systems based on the optimal velocity model (OVM), which is an advanced car-following model. In addition, we improve the OVM, which is called the advanced OVM, by including a term for the delay time and by setting up a boundary condition of acceleration in order to enhance the VPC system and to ensure its robustness. This paper presents the design of a robust distributed state-feedback controller in the discrete-time domain for homogeneous vehicle platoons with undirected topologies, whose dynamics are subjected to external disturbances and under random single packet drop scenario. A linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach is used for devising the control gains such that a bounded H∞ norm is guaranteed. Furthermore, a lower bound of the robustness measure, denoted as γ gain, is derived analytically for two platoon communication topologies, i.e., the bidirectional predecessor following (BPF) and the bidirectional predecessor leader following (BPLF). It is shown that the γ gain is highly affected by the communication topology and drastically reduces when the information of the leader is sent to all followers. Finally, numerical results demonstrate the ability of the proposed methodology to impose the platoon control objective for the BPF and BPLF topology under random single packet drop

Published Date: 2021-12-29; Received Date: 2021-12-06