Stabilizing Periodic Control of Automated Vehicle Platoon With Minimized Fuel Consumption

The platooning of automated vehicles has the potential of significantly enhancing the fuel efficiency of road transportation. This paper presents a periodic switching control method for an automated vehicle platoon to minimize the overall fuel consumption. Considering the nonlinearity of switching operation, the concept of bounded stability for a platoon of vehicles is defined to replace conventional internal stability and string stability. The distributed servo loop controller based on dual-pulse-and-glide operation is designed for each vehicle, wherein a sectionalized switching map is adopted for proper mode selection. It is proved that such a control method achieves bounded stability for the homogeneous platoon, with the range error of each follower being exactly confined within a predefined central region. The simulation validation shows that this method can save the overall fuel consumption up to 21.8% in comparison with conventional linear quadratic controllers. In addition, it also has desirable robustness with respect to the dynamical heterogeneity in the platoon, i.e., the deviation of intervehicle states from a predefined central region increases approximately linearly with respect to the growth of platoon heterogeneity.