EFFICIENT METHODS TO ASSESS LINEAR AND NON-LINEAR AUTOMOTIVE PLATOON CONTROL STABILITY AND PERFORMANCE

摘要

This work proposes a set of methods and tools to analyse and quantify key performance aspects of controlled automotive platoons. These methods assess classical stability and string stability properties in both analytical and empirical settings. An automotive platoon consists of multiple tightly spaced vehicles which aim to follow a desired velocity or distance profile safely, autonomously, and efficiently. Cooperative vehicular platooning can greatly improve traffic efficiency and safety, while increasing traffic throughput and fuel efficiency. One difficulty for establishing a stable platoon, besides classical stability of individual vehicles, is known as ”string stability”. Essentially, in a string stable platoon, disturbances of any individual vehicle are not amplified along the platoon. In addition to stability, the performance of a platoon control structure must be quantified, for example by measuring disturbance rejection bandwidth / control error decay rate. Most of the proposed platoon control architectures developed in the past guarantee platoon stability/string stability only under restrictive assumptions. In this work tools and methods are proposed to analyse classical stability, error signal measures, as well as analytical and empirical string stability. This allows the user to evaluate platoon safety and performance for given control structures and conduct parameter studies at various levels of system complexity. To investigate platoon behaviour under realistic conditions, test scenarios are empirically evaluated in a co-simulation of multiple instances of the commercial simulation software IPG TruckMaker.