Nonlinear moving horizon control for following vehicles in truck platooning

Abstract

Vehicle platoon has become a research hotpot due to its potential for improving traffic utility and fuel efficiency, for which reliable tracking performance is critical. This paper proposes a nonlinear moving horizon control strategy that ensures that all vehicles in a truck platoon maintain the consensus speed and the desired spacing distance between the adjacent vehicles. The proposed control strategy guarantees the tracking performance of the following vehicles in platoon by predicting and tracking the state of the adjacent preceding vehicles. To verify the availability of the proposed control strategy, simulations with a platoon of two homogeneous trucks are carried out based on a joint Matlab-TruckSim simulation. The results specify that an acceptable tracking speed and the desired distance between adjacent vehicles can be obtained by the presented nonlinear moving horizon controller.