Design and Simulation of Car-following Control System for Intelligent Vehicles

To improve the driving safety and comfort during car-following, a hierarchical car-following control system is designed. The upper-level controller determines the desired longitudinal velocity according to the vehicle state information from sensors and the minimum safety distance model based on time headway. The lower-level controller with switch logic between throttle and brake is employed for the longitudinal velocity control. The optimal PID parameters in the lower-level controller are tuned with orthogonal experimental design (OED) method, aiming at minimizing the comprehensive index about safety and comfort. Co-simulations of the car-following system are implemented in the simulation platform based on PreScan and Matlab/Simulink. The following vehicle is controlled to track a leading vehicle with a preset time-varying velocity, ensuring a safety distance between the two vehicles and improving driving comfort. The simulation results show that the car-following control system has a good performance on car-following and is suitable for intelligent vehicles.