STRING STABILITY PROPERTIES OF AHS LONGITUDINAL VEHICLE CONTROLLERS

A recently proposed strategy for evaluating the string stability properties of longitudinal vehicle controllers used in Automated Highway Systems (AHS) is to consider the platoon as a mass-spring-damper system. This simplified analysis framework results in linear closed-loop systems, yielding transfer functions which characterize the spacing error response of the platoon. These transfer functions are then used to compare the string stability properties of a variety of longitudinal vehicle controllers, sometimes with unexpected results.