Automatic Modeling And Performance Evaluation Of Vehicle Platoon In Matlab Environment

The platooning of automated vehicles has promising improvements on traffic efficiency, fuel economy, and traffic safety. However, the information flow topology(IFT) among automated vehicles can significantly affect the performances of a platoon, which has raised a hot research topic i.e., the relationship between different IFT and platoon performances including string stability, fuel economy, and traffic smoothness. This thesis investigates the performance of automated vehicle platoon under different IFTs.The automated vehicle platoon, assumed to be on single-lane highway road, has at least six types of IFTs. For automated modeling design, an algebraic graph theory is used to form vehicle platoons with different IFT. The automated platoon is simulated in Matlab/Simulink environment after designing an effective automatic modeling package. The automatic modeling package consists of two main functionalities, i.e., human-machine interface, and collector-executor algorithm. The interface provides users with a method to input the platoon parameters, and the collector-executor algorithm automatically builds the platoon for simulation. In simulations, homogeneous platoon and three control gain scenarios are considered to evaluate the vehicle platoon performances. Three performance metrics of the platoon are then defined to describe the platoon performances, i.e., string stability, fuel consumption, and traffic smoothness.The platoon simulations are separated into two groups i.e. non-leader following(NLFT) topologies, including preceding following(PF), bidirectional(BD), and two predecessors following(TPF), and leader following topologies(LFT), including predecessor-leader following(PLF), bidirectional-leader(BDL), and two predecessorleader following(TPLF) topologies. The distributed controllers are designed for the platoon with linear feedback again, and constant time headway policy is selected. The simulation results showed that under identical control parameters and range policy, vehicle platoons under non-leader following topologies can ensure both internal stability and string stability, while those under leader following topologies only ensure internal stability, but difficult to string stability. In addition, platoons with complex topologies might damage the balance on string stability, traffic smoothness, and fuel consumption.