Exploiting Heterogeneity in the Decentralised Control of Platoons

TL;DR

This paper shows that using heterogeneous control dynamics in decentralized vehicle platooning architectures significantly improves scalability and disturbance attenuation, overcoming limitations of traditional homogeneous approaches.

Contribution

It introduces heterogeneity into decentralized control architectures, enabling scalable and robust platoon performance even with bandwidth constraints.

Findings

Heterogeneity eliminates exponential disturbance growth in predecessor following architectures.

Heterogeneity makes bidirectional platoons length-independent in behavior.

Scalability is achieved without increasing bandwidth requirements.

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of decentralised control architectures with heterogeneous dynamics for improving performance in large-scale systems. Our focus is on two well-known decentralised approaches; the 'predecessor following' and 'bidirectional architectures' for vehicle platooning. The former, utilising homogeneous control dynamics, is known to face exponential growth in disturbance amplification throughout the platoon, resulting in poor scalability properties. We demonstrate that by incorporating heterogeneous control system dynamics, this limitation disappears entirely, even under bandwidth constraints. Furthermore, we reveal that introducing heterogeneity in the bidirectional architecture allows the platoon's behaviour to be rendered independent of its length, allowing for highly scalable performance.