Dissipativity-Based Decentralized Control and Topology Co-Design for Vehicular Platoons With Disturbance String Stability

Merging and splitting of vehicles in a platoon is a basic maneuvering that makes the platoons more scalable and flexible. The main challenges lie in simultaneously ensuring the compositionality of the distributed controllers and the string stability of the platoon. To handle this problem, we propose a control and topology co-design method for vehicular platoons, which enables seamless merging and splitting of vehicular platoons. In particular, we first present a centralized linear matrix inequality (LMI)-based control and topology co-design optimization for vehicular platoons with formal (centralized) disturbance string stability (DSS) guarantee. Then, these centralized DSS constraints are made decentralized by developing an alternative set of sufficient conditions. Using these decentralized DSS constraints and Sylvester's criterion-based techniques, the said centralized LMI problem is decomposed into a set of smaller decentralized LMI problems that can be solved at each vehicle in a compositional manner, enabling seamless vehicular merging/splitting. Finally, simulation examples are provided to validate the proposed co-design method through a specifically developed simulator.