Connected Automated Vehicle Platoon Control With Input Saturation and Variable Time Headway Strategy

The rationality of the spacing strategy directly affects automated vehicle safety and road utilization. It is necessary to consider practical actuator constraints in vehicle platoon control systems to ensure the security and driving comfort. In this paper, an important actuator constraint and a more effective spacing strategy are embedded into the connected automated vehicle platoon control. A new consensus-based control approach with the input saturation and variable time headway (VTH) spacing strategy is proposed. The homogeneous time-varying communication delays are included into the consensus algorithm. By employing the Lyapunov-Krasovskii theorem and the Lyapunov-Razumikhin theorem, the global asymptotic stability conditions of the system under fixed topology and switching topology are derived, respectively. Numerical simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and the necessity of introducing the input saturation and VTH spacing strategy.