Distributed Model Predictive Control of Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons with Guaranteed String Stability

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed model predictive control (DMPC) algorithm for longitudinal heterogeneous vehicle platoons with unidirectional topologies. Each vehicle is assigned a local open-loop optimal control problem, in which the cost function is designed by penalizing the difference between the states of the vehicle and its neighbors, and several constraints are introduced to facilitate the internal stability as well as string stability of the vehicle platoon. We prove that the proposed DMPC algorithm is iteratively feasible, and ensures the internal stability and string stability of the vehicle platoon under any arbitrary unidirectional communication topology containing the predecessor-following topology. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the DMPC algorithm.