Robust Car-Following Control of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles: A Stochastic Model Predictive Control Approach

Vehicle platooning has gained significant attention due to its potential to enhance road safety and efficiency. Leveraging stochastic optimization methods, this paper presents a distributed Stochastic Model Predictive Control (SMPC) controller tailored for vehicle platooning systems to improve their safety and robustness. Uniquely, our methodology describes the vehicle's dynamic state and establishes the error equation for the platoon system founded on a mass-spring structure structural concept, a departure from existing models. Using this, we formulate an SMPC platoon control framework resilient to stochastic disturbances, effectively integrating desired objective and probabilistic chance constraints. Given the probabilistic information of the random perturbations, an equivalent, computationally efficient framework for the SMPC is deduced under a fixed distribution. Comprehensive simulation experiments serve to validate the efficacy of our proposed SMPC platoon controller.