Rigid Communication Topologies: Impact on Stability, Safety, Energy Consumption, Passenger Comfort, and Robustness of Vehicular Platoons

TL;DR

This work provides a unified analytical framework to evaluate rigid communication topologies in vehicular platoons by deriving coupled intervehicle dynamics and a decoupling mapping that yields precise relative-state expressions. Four high-signal metrics—SaCGDI, intervehicle safety metrics (MTTC/MDRAC variants), energy consumption (AMEEI), and passenger comfort (AAMEA/AAMEJ)—are used to compare 10 RCTs across three leader-acceleration profiles and 1600 CGVs. The results show that forward-looking, leader-centric topologies (TPFL, MPF, PFL) substantially outperform topology that emphasizes information from vehicles behind, with reduced safety risks, lower energy use, and improved comfort; backward-information topologies can degrade performance, especially as platoon size grows. The findings provide concrete guidance for V2V topology design in CAV platoons and motivate future work on delay-robust and cyber-attack-resilient topologies in practical deployments.

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of rigid communication topologies (RCTs) on the performance of vehicular platoons, aiming to identify beneficial features in RCTs that enhance vehicles behavior. We introduce four performance metrics, focusing on safety, energy consumption, passenger comfort, and robustness of vehicular platoons. The safety metric is based on momentary distances between neighboring vehicles, their relative velocities, and relative accelerations. Thus, to have access to these relative values, we formulate the coupled dynamics between pairs of neighboring vehicles, considering initial conditions (position, velocity, acceleration), leader vehicle's velocity/acceleration trajectory, deployed RCT, and vehicles' parity/disparity. By decoupling the dynamics using a mapping matrix structured on deployed RCT, vehicles' features, and control gains, precise formulations for distance errors, relative velocities, and relative accelerations between all neighboring vehicles, over the travel time, are obtained. Comparing performance metric results across RCTs highlights that downstream information transmission-from vehicles ahead, particularly the leader vehicle, to vehicles behind-significantly enhances platoon stability, safety, energy consumption, and passenger comfort metrics. Conversely, receiving state information from vehicles behind degrades metrics, compromising safety, increasing energy consumption, and reducing passenger comfort. These findings underscore that forward-looking, leader-centric communications between vehicles markedly enhance platoon efficiency and safety.

Figures (17)

• Figure 1: Schematic of a heterogeneous platoon.
• Figure 2: Illustrating Safe, Unsafe, and Colliding scenarios.
• Figure 3: Connection types between neighboring vehicles.
• Figure 4: Some common TURCTs between vehicles.
• Figure 5: Some common TBRCTs between vehicles.

Theorems & Definitions (2)

• proof
• proof