Bandwidth-Aware Transmission Scheduling and Event- Triggered Distributed MPC for Vehicle Platoons

This paper jointly designs the communication and control schemes for vehicle platoons by taking into consideration of the limited communication and computing resources of vehicles. Aiming at achieving the stable tracking of the member vehicles at a desired inter-vehicle distance and the same velocity, while improving the communication and computation efficiency, we propose a bandwidth-aware transmission scheduling (BATS) mechanism and an event-triggered distributed model predictive control (ET-DMPC) scheme for the longitudinal control of a vehicle platoon. Firstly, by introducing bandwidth-aware parameters, the triggering threshold for the event-triggered BATS mechanism is dynamically adjusted according to vehicle and bandwidth states. Then, an output-based ET-DMPC scheme is designed to ensure that the platoon tracks a reference velocity and maintains the desired inter-vehicle distance. Lastly, extensive simulations are carried out and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed BATS mechanism and ET-DMPC scheme in terms of adaptive communication scheduling and low computational burden.