Effectiveness Proving and Control of Platoon-Based Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

With the application of cyber-physical systems, many cargo fleets take the initiative to form a platoon during transportation. Compared with the conventional signal timing algorithms, the platoon-based algorithm can greatly reduce the traveling time. However, the mathematical proof of the platoon-based algorithm performance has not been given for vehicular cyber-physical systems. In this paper, we proposed a timed Petri nets model to delineate the behavior of platoons at an isolated intersection. According to the results of a model structure analysis, we proved that to minimize the total queue length at any time, the platoon must be kept as large as possible. Based on the results, an efficient platoon-based traffic control algorithm is presented for the vehicular cyber-physical systems at intersections. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than many conventional signal timing strategies.