Subject Ph. D.

Vehicular platoon control can effectively achieve group consensus, reduced fuel consumption, improve vehicular running safety and increase road capacity. However, this emerging technology faces several challenges like unreliable vehicle-to-vehicle communications, sensitivity to road traffic and to additions/reductions in platoon size. A small gap results in a short inter-vehicular distance, which is fuel efficient when the vehicles are moving at constant speeds due to air drag reductions, but when the vehicles accelerate and brake a lot, a bigger time gap is more fuel efficient. Similarly, a poor communication network motivates a higher inter-vehicular gap for safety while a smaller gap can be maintained with reliable communications. All these issues motivate platoons that switch the control strategy according to the scenario [1,2]. However, while the string stability of a given control scheme is well studied [3], guarantees on a switching control are rarely examined. Our objective in this Ph.D. is to theoretically analyze the performances of such switching control laws.

[1] T. R. Gonçalves, R.F. Cunha, V. S. Varma, S. E. Elayoubi and M. Cao, Reducing fuel consumption in platooning systems through reinforcement learning, IFAC ICONS 2022. [2] Li, Y., Tang, C., Li, K., Peeta, S., He, X., and Wang, Y. (2018). Nonlinear finite-time consensus-based connected vehicle platoon control under fixed and switching communication topologies. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 93, 525-543. [3] Ploeg, J., Shukla, D. P., Van De Wouw, N., and Nijmeijer, H. (2013). Controller synthesis for string stability of vehicle platoons. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(2), 854-865.