Vehicle following control model of platoon considering communication delay

Adaptive cruise control and vehicle ad-hoc network are two key technologies of platoon. Adaptive cruise control provides support for automatic drive, and vehicle ad-hoc network makes inter-vehicle communication possible. In previous research, communication and control of platoon are discussed separately and these studies always overlooked links between the two. As a result, platoon's vehicle-following control is ineffective in non-ideal communication scenario. In this paper, a structure model and a communication model of platoon are established respectively and the interaction between communication and control is analyzed. By adding weighted constraint scheme and information prediction strategy on the intelligent driver model (IDM), we present an improved vehicle-following control model that compensates for the influence of communication delay, expecting to reduce the effect of communication delay on platoon and improving the performance of platoon. The performance of the model is evaluated on a simulation platform built by SUMO, OMNeT++ and VEINS. The experiment results show that the improved model can effectively increase stability and safety of platoon under the situation of communication delay. © 2019, Editorial Office of Control and Decision. All right reserved.