Adaptive Event-Triggered Platoon Control Under Unreliable Communication Links

The application of inter-vehicle wireless communication offers significant advantages in terms of improving traffic efficiency and safety while also suffering from unreliable communication links. This paper deals with the problem of event-triggered vehicular platoon control with communication time delay and package dropout, aiming to achieve a suitable trade-off between communication utilization and vehicle following performance. A disturbance based platoon model with communication time delay, package dropout and event-triggered scheme is established. Subsequently, the criterion for co-designing the event-trigger parameters and CACC controller parameters is derived by adopting the parameter space approach with the requirements to ensure individual vehicle internal stability, following accuracy and platoon string stability. To achieve a superior trade-off between communication resource utilization and following performance under unreliable communication condition, the adaptive event-triggered threshold is designed for the varying failure probability. The effectiveness of the proposed adaptive CACC strategy is verified using numerical simulations of a six-vehicle platoon during the FTP 72 drive cycle. The comparison results of three different scenarios show that the adaptive event-triggered scheme guarantees the following performance even when failure probability is 0.4.