Longitudinal acceleration allocation for cooperative adaptive cruise control including platoon kinematics

Traffic congestion and traffic safety are two major issues of urban traffic. The cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) can improve the above issues effectively. This paper intends to introduce the platoon kinematics into the cooperative adaptive cruise control, so that the host vehicle will follow platoon timely and reasonably dependent on the whole platoon kinematics, improving traffic safety and efficiency. Firstly, the "virtual centroid" is proposed to describe the platoon kinematics, and the switching law of the host vehicle following target between the virtual centroid and the preceding vehicle is presented. Then, the cooperative adaptive cruise control upper strategy including platoon kinematics is derived and the sliding mode controller for longitudinal acceleration allocation is designed. Finally, the proposed cooperative adaptive cruise control is validated by virtual test with co-simulation with CarSim and Simulink. The results demonstrate that the proposed cooperative adaptive cruise control strategy shows significant benefits of prospective and synchronous, with which the host vehicle responses according to the following platoon kinematics, reducing the response lag accumulation, and realizing the vehicle-following behavior safely and efficiently.