Safety of Connected Vehicle Platoons

Conventionally, a frequency domain condition on the spacing error transfer function is employed to assure string stability in a vehicle platoon. While this criteria guarantees that the power of spacing error signals diminish downstream, in order to avoid a collision it is more relevant to study the maximum spacing errors across the platoon. In this paper, we first re-examine the notion of string stability as it relates to safety by providing an upper bound on the maximum spacing error of any vehicle in a homogeneous platoon in terms of the lead vehicle's input. We also extend our previous work by providing a sufficient condition for minimum string stable headway for platoons experiencing burst-noise packet losses. Finally, we utilize throttle and brake maps to develop a longitudinal vehicle model and validate it against a Lincoln MKZ which is then used for numerical corroboration of the proposed lossy vehicle following algorithms.