The platooning of connected and automated vehicles has the potential to significantly improve the fuel efficiency of road transportation. Shortening the carfollowing distance to reduce aerodynamic drag is often used to improve fuel economy in today's platoons, but suffers high risk of rear-end collision. This paper presents an alternative solution to reduce platoon fuel consumption, i.e., periodic longitudinal control, which remains effective under the condition of middle or long following distance. The periodic controller can be applied to heterogeneous platoons, in which the optimal switching rule is designed for each vehicle to maintain a safe following distance while guaranteeing a collective bounded stability. Sectionalized switching maps based on state trajectory analysis are designed to choose the appropriate driving mode. The bounded stability for heterogeneous platoons is proved through the set-invariance theory, which ensures that the inter-vehicle distances are confined in a desirable range. Simulation results show that the proposed method can save up to 18% fuel compared to linear quadratic (LQ) controller, and all vehicles achieve bounded range error and velocity fluctuation.

中文翻译：

---

具有异构动力学和有界稳定保证的多车连接的最优周期控制

联网和自动化车辆的编队有可能显着提高道路运输的燃油效率。缩短跟车距离以减少空气动力阻力在当今的车队中经常被用来提高燃油经济性，但追尾的风险很高。本文提出了一种降低排油耗的替代解决方案，即周期性纵向控制，该方法在中长跟距条件下仍然有效。周期控制器可应用于异构队列，其中为每个车辆设计最佳切换规则以保持安全跟随距离，同时保证集体有界稳定性。设计基于状态轨迹分析的分段切换图，以选择合适的驾驶模式。通过集合不变性理论证明了异构排的有界稳定性，确保车辆间距离限制在理想范围内。仿真结果表明，与线性二次（LQ）控制器相比，所提出的方法可以节省高达 18% 的燃料，并且所有车辆都实现了有界的距离误差和速度波动。