TrueTime Testing of Inter-Vehicular Communications for Cooperative Vehicles using Distributed Generalized Predictive Control

The main motivation for the development of the cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) systems is to reduce traffic congestion by increasing the roads’ capacity and improving the flow of vehicles on motorways and by mitigating traffic flow disturbances. Starting from an already developed CACC system for the follower vehicles in a platoon, this paper proposes the testing of the complete control architecture using the TrueTime toolbox, which has capabilities of simulating wireless communication networks and network nodes with a behaviour close to the one experienced in real-life. The control architecture for the vehicles in the whole platoon is composed of: (i) a cruise control (CC) system for the leader vehicle based on a PID controller, (ii) a CACC system for the follower vehicles based on a generalized predictive control (GPC) strategy with a feed-forward component to mitigate the negative effects of leader accelerations/decelerations by transmitting the speed of the relative leader to the next follower in line.