Platoon Control of Connected Vehicles from a Networked Control Perspective: Literature Review, Component Modeling, and Controller Synthesis

The platooning of connected and automated vehicles has the potential to significantly benefit the road traffic, including enhancing highway safety, improving traffic capacity, and reducing fuel consumption. This paper presents a four-component analysis framework for platoon systems from a networked control perspective, including a literature review by network awareness, unified models of key components, and two application cases for controller synthesis. The networked control perspective naturally decomposes a platoon into four interrelated components, namely, 1) node dynamics (ND), 2) information flow topology (IFT), 3) formation geometry (FG), and 4) distributed controller (DC). The existing literature is categorized under this framework and analyzed according to the component features. The unified mathematical models are derived for platoons with linear dynamics and distributed controllers. As a case study, a distributed controller synthesis method is introduced for homogeneous platoons, which guarantees the internal stability in the presence of a broad class of topologies with/without uniform time-delays. The effectiveness is demonstrated by numerical simulations.