Integrated communication and control design for fuel-efficient vehicle platooning

Abstract

As a promising application for autonomous driving, vehicle platooning aims at increas-ing traffic throughput, improving road safety, and reducing air pollution and fuel consumption. However, frequent traffic perturbations will bring more fuel consumption because vehicles driving in a platoon require more control to ensure safe driving, especially in high-density scenes. In this paper, considering the traffic perturbations and high-density scenes, we integrate communication and control systems to reduce the fuel consumption of a platoon. By obtaining the velocities of multiple vehicles ahead through a long-term evolution-vehicle (LTE-V) network, we propose a modified distributed model predictive control (DMPC) method to smooth traffic perturbations and handle the constraints of vehicle state and control. In addition, considering a limited number of uplink channels that can be reused in the platoon and the uncertainty of wireless channels, a radio resource allocation optimization problem in the LTE-V network is modeled. This problem is solved in two steps including maximum vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) broadcast distance and minimum weight matching. This resource allocation scheme increases the platoon-based V2V broadcast distance while ensuring the ergodic capacity requirement of the cellular user (CUE) uplink communication and the reliability of platoon-based V2V communication. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves fuel efficiency compared to the existing schemes.