An extendable maneuver management framework with fault‐tolerant mechanism for vehicle platoon control system in highway scenario

Abstract

AbstractVehicle platoons can encounter many complex scenarios in practice that were not considered in the design, which reveals the need to add new maneuvers. Platoon control system will face the challenge of the lack of maneuver scalability in practical applications. To address this problem, this study introduces an extendable maneuver management framework with fault‐tolerant mechanism on the basis of the hierarchical architecture for the platoon control system. Maneuvers and roles are two dimensions, based on which the management strategies are decoupled. They enable each vehicle in the platoon to execute management strategies of various maneuvers and make it possible to expanding new behaviors into existing strategies. The fault‐tolerant mechanism is designed as a maneuver triggered by hardware failures to remain safe before taking over. Furthermore, three typical maneuvers are selected for case studies to illustrate the management strategies in this framework. Finally, a comprehensive simulation scenario integrating different maneuvers is designed and a real‐world implementation using micro‐vehicles is conducted. The results demonstrate that the proposed two‐dimensional framework could effectively address various maneuvers and satisfy the computational real‐time requirements.