Distributed Predictive Control for String Stability of Heterogonous Vehicle Platoons with Multiple Communication Topologies

This paper considers the longitudinal string stability problem of large-scale heterogeneous nonlinear vehicle platoons with multiple unidirectional communication topologies and we propose a distributed model predictive control (MPC) strategy with guaranteed string stability for the vehicle platoon. Each vehicle in the platoon is viewed as be dynamically decoupled but coupled by spatial constraints with different information flows. Moreover, a local receding horizon open-loop optimal problem is formulated for the individual vehicles, where each cost function is defined based on the information of connected vehicles and the errors between the predicted and assumed trajectories. By average terminal constraints, some conditions are derived to ensure string stability of the platoon in closed with the distributed MPC. The effectiveness of the proposed results is illustrated by some simulation experiments.