A distributed model predictive control method combined with delay compensator for multiple vehicle platoons

With an increasing number of vehicles on the road, multiple-vehicle platoons have become a new solution under communication constraints. However, the existing studies seldom consider the effect of the tail vehicle on the information transfer and platoon control over long distances, and thus the control performance under time-varying delays is unacceptable. In this study, a hierarchical multi-platoon control architecture considering the backbone platoon and sub-platoons is proposed under non-ideal communication conditions, where the backbone platoon layer communication topology is designed to achieve backbone platoon control and appropriate coordination among sub-platoons. Distributed model predictive controllers (DMPCs) for backbone- and sub-platoons that integrate delay compensation have been proposed. Buffers and delay compensators in the proposed DMPC are designed to reduce the interference caused by non-ideal communications. The asymptotic stability is analyzed at the sub- and multi-platoon levels. The results show that compared with traditional DMPC without a compensator, the proposed DMPC can eliminate the velocity lag and steady-state spacing errors and maintain the maximum velocity and spacing errors within 0.11 m/s and 0.17 m, respectively, under certain operating conditions. Thus, the proposed method guarantees the stability of multiple platoons under both the constant and time-varying delay conditions.