Centralized and decentralized distributed control of longitudinal vehicular platoons with non-uniform communication topology

In this paper, the distributed control of a longitudinal platoon of vehicles with non-uniform communication topology is studied. In the case of non-uniform communication topology, some eigenvalues of the network's matrix may be complex which complicates the stability analysis of the platoon. Most previous studies on vehicular platooning focus mainly on uniform topologies such as uni-directional, bi-directional, and multi predecessors following. Since all eigenvalues of these topologies are real, the stability analysis can be performed in a straightforward manner. A third-order linear differential model is employed to describe the upper-level dynamics of each vehicle. The 3 N-order closed-loop dynamics of the platoon are decoupled to individual third-order dynamics by presenting a new approach. Two new centralized and decentralized control protocols are introduced to perform the stability analysis of the closed-loop dynamics. A constant time headway strategy is employed to adjust the inter-vehicle spacing. Simulation results with different scenarios are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.