Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control of Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons with Bidirectional Communication

Vehicle platooning is deemed a promising solution to improve traffic safety, reduce fuel consumption and increase traffic throughput and road capacity. Road throughput can be increased by driving at small inter-vehicle distances. Adjusting the spacing with both the preceding and the succeeding vehicles using bidirectional communication can potentially improve the platoon cohesiveness and is crucial when considering the synchronized merging scenario. This paper presents vehicle controllers for cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) for heterogeneous vehicle platoons. To achieve desired inter-vehicle spacing with respect to a predecessor and a follower, a bidirectional communication scheme is employed. Moreover, conditions for vehicle stability are provided and string stability properties of the platoon analyzed. Finally, effectiveness of the controller is verified in a simulation study.