Investigation of Different Communication Topologies for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Systems

After Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system applications, Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) systems are becoming an important part of automotive technology and industry in autonomous vehicles convoy applications. Together with this developing technology, CACC systems use vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication to automatically transmit the movement information of vehicles. In this context, ACC systems use Radar or LIDAR measurements while CACC systems also consider the acceleration of the preceding vehicle. In this paper, the forms of information transmission between vehicles in autonomous vehicle convoys using CACC systems have been examined. From these forms of information transmission, the leader following, the predecessor follow-ing and the leader – predecessor following topologies have been considered. For each topology, an autonomous vehicle convoy consisting of eight vehicles was modeled in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. The feedforward and the feedback control system structure were given for CACC and ACC systems. For different communication topologies, the position-time, the speed-time, the acceleration-time and the headway time-time results were obtained. The maximum intervehicle distance error plots for each vehicle in different topology convoys were given to analyze the dynamic behavior of the convoys. The results have been analyzed in terms of the maximum intervehicle distance, the maximum speed, the minimum and the maximum acceleration, and the maximum headway time deviation from the desired headway time.