Control Parameter Adjustment and Transmission Power Optimization for Vehicle Platoons with Communication Outage

The advantage of vehicle platoons is reflected in their tighter inter-vehicle spacing. However, under the non-ideal communication environment, communication outage occurs which may cause the distance between adjacent vehicles too close to result in a collision accident. Considering the communication outage with predecessor following between vehicles in a platoon, and applying the constant time headway policy, firstly, this paper quantifies the relationship among headway time, control parameter and communication reliability probability while satisfying plant stability and string stability. Then, given a communication reliability probability, the parameter space method is used to obtain the range of the control parameter, so as to ensure platoon stability. Moreover, we optimize the transmission power of vehicles to minimize the worst outage probability by some transformation and the adoption of the Perron-Frobenius theorem. In this way, an iterative update rule is presented to obtain the optimal transmission power. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control parameter adjustment method and power optimization scheme.