String Stability Analysis of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Vehicles Considering Multi-Anticipation and Communication Delay

In the literature, various models of cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) vehicles have been proposed and studied. To design efficient CACC systems, analytical stability analysis is needed to understand the stability properties of CACC models. Recently, a series of experiments on commercial adaptive cruise control (ACC) vehicles have shown that these vehicles can be string stable only to the detriment of a low capacity. As an attempt to solve this issue, this study investigates the stability of multi-anticipative CACC vehicles with Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication delay using the Lyapunov function method and the Lyapunov functional method, and the following results have been obtained: (i) From the methodological perspective, the Lyapunov function method overcomes the difficulty of the transfer function method to derive the stability condition of the multi-anticipative model. The Lyapunov functional method can predict with good accuracy the impact of communication delay. (ii) The multi-anticipative model successfully ensures both traffic stability and high capacity. (iii) The critical wavelength at which traffic becomes unstable follows a power law independently of the model’s parameters when the sensitivity to acceleration is not considered. (iv) The realistic communication delay has only a slight impact on the stability of the CACC system. Our study might represent a reliable reference to improve the stability of CACC vehicles while preserving a high throughput.