Constrained Model Predictive Control using Kinematic Model of Vehicle Platooning in VISSIM Simulator

Driving Heavy Duty Vehicles (HDVs) as a platoon has potential to significantly reduce the fuel consumption, human labor and increase the safety. A suitable controller which can maintain the vehicle movement in a defined topology is essential for HDV platooning. This paper proposes a controller based on the combination of Constant Distance (CD) and Headway Time (HT) topologies using Model Predictive Control (MPC) for a longitudinal HDVs platoon. In addition to this, a MPC controller is compared with conventional PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) controller. The controller aims to maintain intervehicular distance and headway time between the vehicles for two cases, namely unconstrained and constrained optimization problem. The predictive control algorithm uses a kinematic model of vehicle platooning. A systematic handling of constraints yields significant improvements in the performance of the proposed MPC strategy over conventional PID controller. A road network of a U.S. freeway I5 has been built in VISSIM for the simulations. The results and discussions are at the end of the paper.