Distributed Topology Switching Strategy Designing for Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons

Cooperative adaptive cruise control(CACC), as one of the most important technologies of intelligent transportation system(ITS), combines the adaptive cruise control(ACC) with short range communication(DSRC), which can make the platooning distance much more smaller and can avoid collision efficiently. As we all know, the more information the vehicles can receive from the platoon, the better overall stability the vehicles can keep. However, that will lead to an increase in communication resource consumption and cause signal interference with the surrounding vehicles. Therefore, we need to make a tradeoff between the stability of the platoon and communication expense when designing the platoon controller. In this paper we proposed a distributed topology switching algorithm for heterogeneous vehicle platoon, by which the vehicles can switch communication topology automatically according to their state changes and design the liner controller based on the patial given topology. We can learn from the simulation results that the proposed topology switching strategy can balance the control performance and communication spending obviously.