The impact of nonidentical uncertain communication network on the performance of heterogeneous vehicle platoons is investigated through output feedback, where the communication network is modeled as nonidentical multiplicative noise that can effectively capture packet dropout, random delay, and channel fading. Firstly, to address vehicle platoons heterogeneity, a hierarchical safe control framework is utilized, where the upper layer observer is used to observe the state of the leader and the lower layer controller is responsible for tracking the observer states. Secondly, by leveraging the properties of weighted Laplacians, Lyapunov function and matrix singular value decomposition, sufficient conditions for upper layer observer states consensus are derived for undirected information flow (UIF) and directed information flow (DIF) topologies, respectively. These conditions are related to the maximum eigenvalue of the communication topology and the variance of nonidentical uncertainties. Thirdly, using output feedback control, corresponding lower layer distributed controllers are designed to track the upper layer observer states, where the controller gains are independent of the communication topology structure. Ultimately, numerical experiments are performed to validate the obtained outcomes.

This article focuses on discussing the effects of inter-vehicular communication on the performance of platoon control. Different from the existing results established under a critical assumption that the fading channels are independent, this paper models the inter-vehicular communication as Markovian packet loss channel which can capture the temporal interdependencies of packet losses. Our aim is to decide whether there exists a distributed controller such that the underlying vehicle platoon can achieve mean square stability (MSS) over Markovian packet loss channels. First, for the scenario with identical Markovian packet losses, we begin by deriving a necessary and sufficient condition for the platoon MSS, which is established by utilizing the stability principles of Markov jump linear systems. Additionally, we propose a numerically verifiable criterion for MSS, which can be validated through the feasibility of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Furthermore, based on the modified Riccati inequality (MRI), we provide an analytical sufficient condition that ensures MSS for vehicle platoons. This condition is expressed in terms of the information flow topology (IFT) and the statistical parameters of Markov channels. Second, for the case with nonidentical packet dropouts, we introduce a Markovian loss channel based switching (MLCBS) model. Building upon this model, we further propose a sufficient conditon related to IFT and the transition probability matrix, and a distributed controller that is not only easy to implement but also enables the achievement of MSS for vehicle platoons with nonidentical packet dropouts. Ultimately, numerical experiments are performed to validate the obtained outcomes.

Platooning control of connected vehicle systems (CVSs) exhibits great potential in reducing vehicle spacing and improving road throughput. The control performance of CVSs, including stability, string stability, speedability, and scalability—known as the 4S performance indices—has been extensively studied. However, potential safety threats associated with platooning control, such as avoiding collisions during the state convergence process, have not been fully addressed. Specifically, balancing the control performance and safety within CVSs is a challenging problem. In this paper, a distributed nominal controller is initially designed based on the linearized third-order vehicle dynamics model to achieve the 4S performance indices. The collision-free safety state set (SSS) for the platoon is constructed by designing pairwise safety barrier certificates, grounded in the physical constraints of vehicle acceleration. To ensure the forward invariance of the SSS while minimizing control performance degradation, the exponential control barrier function (CBF) is employed to design the centralized safety-critical controller. Specifically, quadratic programming is applied to determine the optimal solution that satisfies the safety barrier constraints while deviating minimally from the nominal controller. To enhance the scalability and reduce the computational complexity, constraints of control input are distributed to individual vehicles with the help of the decentralized safety barrier certificate. Furthermore, explicit solutions for the decentralized safety-critical controller are derived using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition. Simulation scenarios containing different spacing control strategies are provided to validate the effectiveness of the theoretical results in this paper.

This paper investigates the consensus problem of a class of third-order discrete-time connected autonomous vehicle systems (CAVS) with constant delay and multiplicative noise. Based on the neighboring vehicle information, a novel cooperative look-ahead predictor-like control protocols are firstly designed for the CAVS to deal with time delay. Secondly, different from the existing literature that only the sufficient condition is obtained, the necessary and sufficient conditions in sense of the mean-square consensus are derived in this paper. The obtained results not only reveal an explicit relation among the system matrices, noise variance and time delay via an algebraic Riccati equation (ARE), but also amount the optimal control design problem to solving an eigenvalue problem (EVP). Furthermore, considering time delay and perturbations simultaneously, the necessary and sufficient conditions of string stability are further derived. Such conditions only depend on the controller parameters and the network weight. Finally, the validity of derived results is verified by some simulations.

This article is concerned with resilient adaptive event-triggered$H_{\infty }$fuzzy filtering for a class of interval type-2 (IT2) Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy-model-based cyber-physical systems (CPSs) under stochastic sampling and energy-constrained, nonperiodic denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The nonlinear plant with parameter uncertainties is represented as a class of IT2 T–S fuzzy systems, and a novel resilient adaptive event-triggered scheme (AETS) against stochastic sampling and DoS attacks is proposed. In the designing process of the fuzzy filter, a novel resilient switched IT2 T–S fuzzy filter that switches according to the DoS attacks is applied. Then, the switched stochastic delayed systems model with a favorable form is established for the filtering-error-system. Based on the Lyapunov–Krasovskii stability theory and switched stochastic delayed systems theory, the relaxed stability condition is derived, which can ensure that the filtering-error-system is stochastically exponentially stable (SES) where the decay rate is indicated, the maximum frequency of DoS attacks is revealed, and an$H_{\infty }$disturbance attenuation performance is guaranteed. Also, the codesign algorithm is further developed to implement the codesign of fuzzy filter and resilient AETS. Finally, two numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

The work on this paper studies the combined effect of vehicle dynamics, sampling period and the quality of inter-vehicle sensing and communication on the performance of platoon control. First, we induce the sampled control protocol from continuous–time linear consensus protocol by employing zero–order hold circuit and periodic sampling technology, then by virtue of the obtained sampled control protocol, the continuous–time platoon system is equivalently transformed into a discrete–time system. Second, for the inter–vehicle communication with ideal channel and under undirected information flow topology (UIFT), the stability thresholds of control gains are explicitly established by solving a discrete–time simultaneous stabilization problem, bilinear transformation and the Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion. Meanwhile, to ensure the fastest asymptotic stability of the platoon dynamics, we propose an optimal asymptotic convergence factor and a correspondingly optimal sampled control protocol. Third, For the inter–vehicle communication with identical fading networks and under UIFT, through solving a modified Riccati inequality, we provide a sampled control protocol depending not only on information flow topology (IFT) and sampling period, but also on the statistics of the inter–vehicle communication channel. Besides, employing Lyapunov inequality in probability theory, we show a necessary condition for the sampled control protocol ensuring the platoon dynamics mean square stable. Finally, simulations are performed to demonstrate the theory’s discoveries.

This paper proposes a cooperative optimal power split (COPS) method for a group of intelligent electric vehicles with battery/supercapacitor hybrid energy storage systems (HESSs). To achieve good performance, the proposed COPS method is made up of the upper and lower layers: the upper layer aims at obtaining the optimal power demand sequence and sending it to the lower layer; the lower layer attempts to optimize the power split for HESS. Firstly, to ensure the performance of the proposed method in practice, the resistance of the battery and supercapacitor packs as well as the DC/DC converter efficiency are not assumed to be constants, but modeled well in the paper. Secondly, to achieve the optimal power demand sequence, an upper power demand sequence optimization problem is formulated based on distributed model predictive control (DMPC), in which energy demand is incorporated into the cost function. Thirdly, after receiving the optimal power demand sequence, a hybrid power split optimization strategy is presented to obtain the optimal power split, in which the lower HESS power split optimization problem is formulated based on DMPC to decrease battery aging process and energy consumption. Finally, an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm with multiple dynamic populations is used to solve the formulated upper and lower optimization problems. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the benchmark, the proposed COPS method can significantly extend battery lifespan and slightly decrease energy consumption.

This article considers the third-order connected vehicle systems (CVSs) to implement cooperative formation control for autonomous vehicles. The error dynamics is modeled based on the proposed distributed control protocols for two large classes of general network topologies. The performance indices, such as stability, scalability, speedability, and string stability (4S) indices, are investigated. The necessary and sufficient conditions of stability for CVSs are derived and properties of characteristic roots are discussed. These roots are dependent on information of the given network topology. The sufficient conditions of stability, which are independent of network topology, are given by analyzing the range of eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix of the corresponding network topology, so scalability is guaranteed. To guarantee fast convergence speed, the upper boundary of stability margin is derived, which is also independent of the size of the network topology and can be conveniently tuned by the controller gains and model parameter. The necessary and sufficient conditions of stability are also achieved for the bidirectional-leader following (BLF) network topology. The conditions of string stability are further derived to ensure that spacing errors (caused by disturbances) decay along the vehicle platoon. Furthermore, combining the conditions of stability, speedability, and string stability, the CVSs are proven to be not only stable but also string stable and quickly convergent. Thus, the 4S indices can be guaranteed. Numerical simulations are provided to validate the theoretical results.

The leader-following consensus method is studied in the connected vehicle systems (CVSs) with the constant time delay. Based on the neighboring vehicle information, the distributed control protocols are designed for the second-order CVSs with the time delay. The necessary and sufficient conditions of internal stability are derived, in which the relationship between the controller parameters and eigenvalues of the Laplician matrix of the network topology is revealed in absence of time delays. Based on such conditions, the sufficient conditions of internal stability are derived and the resulting thresholds of the controller gains are obtained, which are independent of general network topologies. For the CVSs in the presence of the time delay, the necessary and sufficient conditions of internal stability are also derived and the explicit time-delay upper boundary is also given. The two main results are applied to PLF topology and achieve the corresponding necessary and sufficient conditions of internal stability in both the absence and presence of time-delays cases. Considering influence of perturbations, the conditions of the string stability are further derived under the PLF topology, which can ensure perturbations are not amplified downstream, besides guaranteeing stability of the CVSs. Considering time delays and perturbations simultaneously, furthermore, the conditions of both internal stability and string stability are obtained for the PLF topology. Such conditions only depend on the controller parameters and the network weights. So it is convenient to tune the threshold of the controller parameters and determine the time-delay boundary. Simulations are conducted to validate the theoretical results.

Vehicle safety, passenger comfort, formation control, and fuel economy are the major objectives in the cooperative adaptive cruise control of intelligent vehicles. However, almost none of the current literature takes all of the above objectives into comprehensive consideration. In this paper, a switched control strategy of heterogeneous vehicle platoon for multiple objectives with state constraints is proposed, in which the above four major objectives are all taken into account. To achieve the four major objectives, the distributed model predictive control with multiple objectives (DMPCMO) is proposed. To solve the problem that the DMPCMO controller cannot be achieved because of the inappropriate initial states of the vehicle platoon or the large perturbations in front of the platoon, the safety controller acting as the emergency brake to guarantee vehicle safety is also designed. The switch between the DMPCMO controller and the safety controller forms the switched control strategy of heterogeneous vehicle platoon for multiple objectives (SCSHPM). Since the DMPCMO controller has to be obtained by solving the nonlinear DMPCMO problem, in order to reduce the computational burden as much as possible, the DMPCMO problem is transformed into non-negative and non-positive 0-1 mixed integer linear programming problems after the fuel consumption table is constructed and calculated off-line. Finally, extensive experiments of heterogeneous platoon under different communication topologies are performed in simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SCSHPM.

Cooperative braking control is a very important operation in vehicle platoon control for developing intelligent transportation systems, which can effectively increase road capacity, decrease safety hazard, and avoid serial rear-end collisions. This paper focuses on cooperative braking control of autonomous vehicles, the objectives of which are to ensure intervehicles keep within the safe spacing range and rapidly, smoothly, and accurately stop at the desired target stopping positions with zero velocity. To achieve these goals, a three-vehicle platoon framework is presented and the corresponding dynamic model is established based on only information about front-end and rear-end sensors of vehicles, so communication is not needed. The explicit solutions on the three-vehicle platoon are derived by rigorous convergent analysis and detailed proof, such that intrinsic characteristic of the interconnected vehicles is revealed. The resulting convergent conditions and convergent rate are obtained under three cases including: 1) considering internal virtual forces; 2) considering external braking forces; and 3) considering both the internal virtual forces and external braking forces simultaneously. Moreover, an example is further provided to verify that the derived convergence conditions are effective and sufficient under the different controller parameter selection. These results can provide a solution for a wide class of interconnected systems and a guide for controller design to select control parameters in real engineering applications. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed control approaches.

With increasing growth of vehicles, traffic congestion and safety deserve to be looked at more closely. Cooperative autonomous driving is an effective solution to reduce traffic congestion and ensure traffic safety. In this paper, cooperative autonomous control of multiple vehicles is considered to realize sharing the same roads without collusion with each other. Lane-following and braking control are two basic operations of cooperative driving. The objectives of lane-following are to make inter vehicles keep a safe spacing and run on the middle position of a lane. To reach the targets, two distributed control protocols are proposed in which we consider not only lateral control but also longitudinal control. The stability analysis is also shown for both the control protocols. Braking control is another basic operation for autonomous cooperative control. In order to make vehicles stop at the desired target stopping position (TSP), a new braking control protocol is also designed, and the convergence of which is analyzed and shown that, under three kinds of distinct braking control parameters, the position of the mass center of all vehicles exponentially converges to the TSP, and the velocity of the mass center of all vehicles exponentially converges to zero, which provide a guide for selecting the braking control parameters in real engineering applications. Moreover, the initial and limit conditions of position and velocity are discussed. Simulations demonstrate the validity and superiority of the proposed control protocols compared with existing approaches.