Using fractional calculus for Cooperative car-following Control

The Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is one of the most promising aiding systems to improve traffic flow in highways. When it comes to design a proper control algorithm, robustness against non-modeled dynamics and noise plays a key role not only for improving controller performance but also for increasing the ability of handling heterogeneous vehicle strings. This paper proposes a fractional order controller that is able to deal with non-modeled dynamics whereas keeping simplicity and a low computational cost. System robustness and string stability responses are analyzed for a string of six vehicles, showing a good performance.