ABSTRACT
The platooning of connected automated vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to significantly benefit the road transportation. This paper presents a distributed control algorithm for a platoon of vehicles with discontinuous gear transmissions using the receding horizon optimization. A directed graph is used to describe the underlying communication topology among different vehicles. Each vehicle is modeled as a three-state nonlinear system with mixed integer inputs. To achieve the coordination of multiple vehicles, each vehicle is assigned a local open-loop optimal control problem, of which the cost function is designed by penalizing on both tracking errors and fuel consumption. The equality terminal constraint is employed to guarantee the consensus of desired terminal state in the predictive horizon, which is critical for the asymptotical stability. Numerical simulations demonstrate that this algorithm has the potential to achieve the consensus of multi-vehicles in a platoon while improving fuel efficiency.
