Performance analysis of platoons with adaptive cruise control

The paper investigates under what conditions the controlled vehicles in a platoon follow the time-headway spacing policy and can be guaranteed to avoid collisions. The first result is a requirement on the vehicle delay, which is a quantity that is directly related to the dynamics of the controlled vehicles. The second result shows that if the controlled vehicles have specified first-order dynamics, they follow the time-headway policy permanently and, hence, avoid collisions in all possible situations. For higher-order vehicles, a robustness approach is developed that uses the specified first-order model as approximate representation of the controlled vehicles and analyses how far the platoon may deviate from the behaviour of this ideal platoon. Examples demonstrate that these deviations are usually very small so that the collision avoidance guarantee can be transferred from the approximate model to the real platoon. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.