Centralized and distributed control framework under homogeneous and heterogeneous platoon

Platooning vehicles are beneficial in comfortable driving, safety, and enhanced transportation efficiency. Platooning vehicles with cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) mode can potentially result in a small distance between vehicles with assured string stability. This CACC-based platoon control can be realized by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) or vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication between vehicles. In this regard, the distributed control framework is widely used. It claims robustness to communication uncertainties since each vehicle has its controller. With the rapid research on V2X, the centralized framework is another option for the platooning vehicle control framework. This paper investigates and analyzes the centralized and distributed control framework under platoon uncertainty. In most of the papers, the platoon uncertainty is considered as road slope and vehicle dynamics model. In this paper, the platoon uncertainty refers to the platoon types, namely homogeneous and heterogeneous platoon. The analytical platoon stability is studied for both frameworks under different platoon types. It gives the minimum time gap boundary to guarantee string stability for both frameworks. The numerical string stability is performed by the simulation to verify the analytical. The simulation is done using the integrated PreScan and Matlab/Simulink. Then, the robustness of both frameworks is evaluated under latency and packet loss. Finally, the performance of both frameworks is also evaluated.