Including Follower Dynamics in Beaconing for Platooning Safety

TL;DR

The paper tackles safety risks in adaptive beaconing for platooning by addressing follower-initiated dynamics, an aspect neglected by standard Jerk Beaconing (JB). It introduces JBE, a follower-aware extension of JB that uses three special beacon types to communicate follower stop or speed-change intents to the leader, enabling immediate and safe responses. Across simulations with dense platoons, JBE significantly improves safety during follower-initiated events, incurs only modest increases in channel overhead (CBR), and does not degrade the string stability of PATH CACC under normal conditions. This approach enhances safety and reliability for scalable V2V-enabled platooning in realistic traffic scenarios.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose procedures to address platoon follower dynamics within adaptive beaconing. We implement them in a known adaptive beaconing scheme which is Jerk Beaconing (JB) to improve its safety. We evaluate our proposed approach in terms of safety, string stability and the channel busy ratio (CBR) overhead. The results reveal that our proposal significantly enhances safety without imposing substantial CBR overhead and maintains the string stability of the PATH CACC controller under normal conditions.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: JBE leader loop.
• Figure 2: JBE follower loop.
• Figure 3: Global minimum inter-vehicle distance per simulation run for high and low vehicle densities, 480 and 120 vehicles, respectively. The horizontal dotted red line denotes the target inter-vehicle distance of 5 meters. [Follower Slowing Down].
• Figure 4: Global minimum inter-vehicle distance per simulation run for high and low vehicle densities, 480 and 120 vehicles, respectively. [Follower Stopping].
• Figure 5: Average Channel Busy Ratio (CBR). [Follower Slowing Down].