Active Fault Tolerant Control for Ensuring the Safety of the Intended Functionality of Vehicular Platoons

The safety of the intended functionality challenges of intelligent and connected vehicular platoons is addressed, considering the limitations in perception, execution, and communication systems. An adaptive fault-tolerant control method is proposed to ensure the expected functional safety in platoon operations. Firstly, a platoon fault-tolerant control method is presented to accommodate different intermittent inter-vehicle communication topologies. It includes the design of a distributed augmented interference estimator, fault-tolerant tracking controller, and safety controller, which provide estimation information and handle ideal or partially connected as well as completely interrupted inter-vehicle communication topologies. Additionally, a controller switching condition under time-varying communication conditions and an online parameter adaptive update method are proposed to handle the intermittent communication and controller switching. A 7-vehicle platoon model and control strategy are established using Matlab/Simulink, and a platoon fault-tolerant control hardware-in-the-loop experimental platform is constructed using dSpace and real communication hardware. Simulation and experimental scenarios are designed to validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed control strategy. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method ensures the safe and stable operation of the platoon under various conditions, exhibiting robustness and smooth switching performance. © 2024 Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society. All rights reserved.