Feedforward Strategies for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control in Heterogeneous Vehicle Strings

String stability is an essential property to ensure that the fluctuations are attenuated along vehicle strings. This paper focuses on the fulfillment of string stability in the practical case of heterogeneous vehicle strings that comprise vehicles with different dynamic properties. Using the idea of predecessor following, acceleration feedforward, predicted acceleration feedforward, and input signal feedforward are considered as different possible feedforward strategies. For all strategies, the parameter ranges of predecessor vehicles that ensure string stability of a given vehicle are characterized, computed, and validated by simulation.