Stable control of a heterogeneous platoon of vehicles with switched interaction topology,time-varying communication delay and lag of actuator

This paper is devoted to the study of longitudinal control of heterogeneous vehicular platoons with constant spacing policy between successive vehicles. In order to provide a more precise model, communication delays are assumed to be non-uniform and time-varying. A linear control based on relative measurements by considering communication delay and lag is used as the upper level control of each vehicle. In a vehicular platoon, the time-varying communication topology may be a source of instability of the closed-loop dynamics. Therefore, to perform the stability analysis using common Lyapunov function, three new methods based on Lyapunov–Razumikhin and Lyapunov–Krasovskii theorems are introduced. The results of these methods prove the global asymptotic stability of the resultant switched linear time-varying delay systems. A comparison between the proposed methods indicates that the Krasovskii-based approach is more robust against communication delay and lag than the Razumikhin-based approaches. Several simulation studies are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.