Adaptive Cruise Control of Vehicle Platoons with Wireless State Information

In this paper, we propose a novel method for identifying reduced longitudinal model parameters of vehicles in order to design real-time cooperative adaptive cruise controllers (CACC). We use weighted and filtered accelerations of all preceding vehicles guaranteeing the string stability of highway platoons. As the preliminary step of this strategy, we discuss efficient system modeling and parameter identification of various commercial vehicles for platooning purposes. Then, we analyze effects of platoon topology and filtering preceding vehicles' wireless state information on string stability. Next, the effects of vehicle ordering in the highway strings are discussed for the stability and safety of heterogeneous platoons. The contribution of new CACC strategy over adaptive cruise controllers is discussed based on simulation and practical experiment results.