A New Topology for Homogeneous Vehicular Platoon under Disturbances

Vehicle platooning has attracted a lot of interest in research in the last decade as it introduced a solution to many problems in traffic flow, safety, fuel economy, and reducing CO2 emissions. As the cost reduction is crucial and necessary to the business’s sector, in this paper, communication cost reduction is achieved via proposing a new topology called Bidirectional Odd Leader (BDOL). The BDOL topology is advantageous in terms of cost compared to the BDL topology due to the BDOL is a relaxation of the BDL topology. The string stability of the dynamical system with the proposed topology is first proven through numerical comparison with BDL topology. Then, the performance of the proposed topology has been evaluated by intensive computer-based simulation. A homogeneous platoon consisting of eight vehicles is created and tested on a straight and curved track, while keeping a small desired inter-vehicle distance. We evaluated the performance of our topology, and tested the string stability in many scenarios. These scenarios include platoon moving on a straight track with or without disturbance, lastly a velocity disturbance produced by a curved track affecting the platoon is also investigated. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed topology in achieving the intended objectives.