Cooperative adaptive cruise control presents an opportunity to improve road transportation through increase in road capacity and reduction in energy use and accidents. Clever design of control algorithms and communication systems is required to ensure that the vehicle platoon is stable and meets desired safety requirements. In this paper, we propose a centralized model predictive controller for a heterogeneous platoon of vehicles to reach a desired platoon velocity and individual inter-vehicle distances with driver-selected headway time. In our approach, we allow for interruption from a human driver in the platoon that temporarily takes control of their vehicle with the assumption that the driver will, at minimum, obey legal velocity limits and the physical performance constraints of their vehicle. The finite horizon cost function of our proposed platoon controller is inspired from the infinite horizon design. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first platoon controller that integrates human-driven vehicles. We illustrate the performance of our proposed design with a numerical study.

翻译：协同自适应巡航控制通过提升道路容量、降低能源消耗和交通事故，为改善道路运输提供了机遇。需精心设计控制算法与通信系统，以确保车辆队列的稳定性并满足所需安全要求。本文针对异构车辆队列，提出一种集中式模型预测控制器，使队列能达到期望速度与由驾驶员选择时间间距决定的个体车间距。该方法允许队列中的人类驾驶员临时接管车辆控制，且假定驾驶员至少会遵守法定速度限制及车辆物理性能约束。所提队列控制器的有限时域代价函数受无限时域设计启发。据我们所知，这是首个整合有人驾驶车辆的队列控制器。通过数值仿真验证了所提设计的性能。