Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication for Safe and Fuel-Efficient Platooning

A platoon consists of a string of vehicles traveling close together. Such tight formation allows for increased road throughput and reduced fuel consumption due to decreased air resistance. Furthermore, sensors and control algorithms can be used to provide a high level of automation. In this context, safety - in terms of no rear-end collisions - is a key property that needs to be assured. We investigate how vehicle-to-vehicle communication can be used to reduce inter-vehicle distances while guaranteeing safety in emergency braking scenarios. An optimization-based modeling scheme is presented that, under certain restrictions, provides an analytical calculation of inter-vehicle distances for safe braking. In contrast to earlier simulation-based approaches, the framework allows for computationally efficient solutions with explicit guarantees. Two approaches for computing braking strategies in emergency scenarios are proposed. The first assumes centralized coordination by the leading vehicle and exploits necessary optimal conditions of a constrained optimization problem, whereas the second - the more conservative solution - assumes only local information and is distributed in nature. We illustrate the usefulness of the approaches through several computational simulations.