Distributed Model Predictive Control for Vehicle Platooning with Coupled Constraints under Asynchronous Communication Protocols

Urbanisation and the steady increase in vehicle on the roads are pushing transportation to its limits, leading to congestion, excessive energy consumption, and safety concerns. Connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technology is expected to play a major role in the ongoing evolution of transportation to mitigate transportation issues. In this paper, a distributed model predictive control (DMPC) algorithm is designed for a heterogeneous CAV platooning problem, addressing the challenges posed by coupled collision avoidance constraints. Under an asynchronous bidirectional predecessor-follower (ABD) communication topology, coupled constraints are systematically decoupled, while ensuring the recursive feasibility of the underlying optimisation problem in the DMPC formulation, Lyapunov stability and string stability. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.