Distributed Control of a Vehicular Platoon Using Event-Triggered Communication Strategy Based on State Estimation

Forming a platoon of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) can contribute to alleviating traffic jams, easing traffic congestion, and improving traffic safety. To address the problem of frequent communication possibly causing network congestion when there are many CAVs, we propose the distributed control of a vehicular platoon using an event-triggered communication strategy based on state estimation. First, a hierarchical control structure comprising a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) and fuzzy proportional-integral-derivative (fuzzy PID) controller was established to realize vehicle-following behavior in a platoon. To handle the frequent communication that would waste resources, an event-triggered communication strategy based on state estimation (ETCS-SE) was adopted. The event-triggered communication strategy determines whether to communicate by comparing the transmission error and the dynamic trigger threshold. The distributed Kalman filter reduces the noise of the signal, which further contributes to the reduction of false triggering. The simulation shows that the proposed platoon control algorithm exhibits excellent performance: communication resources are saved by 69.77% and the maximum of the following error is reduced by 14.16%.