Event-triggered cooperative control of vehicle platoons in vehicular ad hoc networks

This paper deals with the problem of event-triggered cooperative control of vehicle platoons with actuator delays caused by fueling and braking. An event-triggered communication scheme (ECS) is introduced, where an event-triggered condition with tunable threshold parameters is designed. Under the ECS, the sampled velocities and accelerations of each follower vehicle are transmitted among neighbors via vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) only when the event-triggered condition is violated. Based on the ECS and a platoon model transformation, the problem of event-triggered cooperative control of the vehicle platoons is transformed into a stabilization problem of a vehicle tracking error system with a time-varying delay. Then, the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional method is employed to formulate some sufficient conditions on stability of the tracking error system with time-varying delay. Based on these conditions, suitable event-triggered feedback controllers can be designed in terms of solutions to a set of linear matrix inequality. A numerical example is given to show effectiveness of the proposed theoretical results.