Vehicle Platooning Systems: Review, Classification and Validation Strategies

Abstract

The increase in vehicle numbers has resulted in the growth of traffic jams in cities and highways, thereby raising various issues on fuel consumption, environmental pollution, and traffic safety [1]. Platooning is an Intelligent Transport System (ITS) [2] application which has emerged as a promising solution for the traffic management in highways. The main idea of vehicle platooning suggests that a set of vehicles travel together while maintaining a small distance between each other. This can lead to an increase in traffic capacity and then an improved traffic management and a reduced travel time. Moreover, the comfort and the safety of passengers are enhanced since the scenarios of extreme acceleration or deceleration are eliminated and the platoon vehicles are considered as a single unit. Furthermore, the emission performance and the fuel economy are significantly improved. A vehicle platoon (also called "convoy") can be seen as a group of vehicles that travel in close coordination through a headway control mechanism. These vehicles maintain a short spacing between them and a relative velocity. The vehicle in the front position, called leader, represents the trajectory and velocity reference. It controls all the following vehicles in the platoon. Each vehicle of the platoon receives orders from the leader that may be communicated either directly or by the preceding vehicle.As platooning system is a critical system, safety is an important issue. However, safety is exposed to several challenges if the system does not achieve its goal without any disturbance. For instance, it is important to ensure that vehicles do not get too close and react within a certain time frame during emergencies. Then, platooning systems need to be validated to ensure a reliable behaviour. For that, it is necessary to clearly define validation strategies (formal verification, simulation, etc.) as this has already been used in critical fields like healthcare [3] and avionics [4]. That is why, we make emphasis in this paper on the works that deal with validation methods and techniques for platooning systems. Related Surveys and Scope of the PaperThere are several useful surveys which have been conducted to deal with some aspects related to platooning algorithms.In Kavathekar and Chen [5], the authors introduce several existing algorithms which focus on vehicle platooning. Besides, they detail some methodologies for obstacle detection and collision avoidance. Furthermore, they are interested in inter-vehicle communication techniques which allow vehicles to share some information such as the velocity, acceleration and detected obstacles. In the same context, the survey of Jia et al.[6] provides a valuable insight about platoon-based vehicular systems. The main issues related to these systems are analysed such as the platoon management and the communication inter-and intra-platoon.The study of Kulla et al. [7] presents a survey in which they introduce a classification of vehicular communication methods which aim to control vehicles. Moreover...

Coalitional Distributed Model Predictive Control Strategy for Vehicle Platooning Applications

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