A Unified Hierarchical Framework for Platoon Control of Connected Vehicles with Heterogeneous Control Modes

Platoon control of connected vehicles (CVs) can greatly improve fuel efficiency and traffic throughput. This paper proposes a unified hierarchical framework for platoon control of CVs with two different types of control modes, i.e., desired acceleration control and desired velocity control. By separating neighboring information interaction from local dynamics control, the framework divides the task of distributed platoon control into two layers, i.e., an upper-level observing layer and a lower-level tracking control layer, to address vehicle dynamics heterogeneity. Within the proposed framework, an observer is designed for following vehicles to observe the leading vehicle’s states through vehicle-to-vehicle communication, while a tracking controller is designed to track the leading vehicle using local observation information. A necessary and sufficient condition is further derived to guarantee asymptotic stability of the platoon control system. Numerical simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical platoon controller.