A Review of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control for Road Vehicles with Network Uncertainty

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) allows connected vehicles in a platoon to maintain smaller headway, which has the potential to enhance driving safety and traffic efficiency. However, various network uncertainty in internet of vehicles, such as communication delay, network attacks, packet loss, can seriously affect the performance of CACC. In this paper, we focus on the research progress of CACC for road vehicles with network uncertainty. Basic issues including information flow topology, inter-vehicle spacing policy, and string stability of platoon are systematically discussed. This paper comprehensively reviews three important aspects of CACC for road vehicles with network uncertainty: communication delay, network attacks and packet loss. Finally, the future research direction of CACC is summarized and prospected.

I. Introduction

With the development of intelligent vehicles and connected vehicles, Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) has emerged as a vehicle cooperative control technology in Advanced Driving Assistance System (ADAS). CACC has great potential to enhance driving safety and traffic efficiency. CACC takes advantage of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication to allow vehicles to maintain smaller headway compared with Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), which breaks through the limitation that ACC only collects vehicle information through on-board sensor such as radar and camera [1] - [2]. CACC shows great development prospects: (1) connected vehicles in a platoon can accurately adjust the inter-vehicle spacing and speed changes through the V2V communication and cooperative control, which avoids rear-end collision and improves driving safety. (2) connected vehicles in a platoon can promptly respond to changes in speed and acceleration of the preceding vehicle through sharing real-time vehicle imformation, which effectively reduces traffic jam and improves traffic efficiency.