A Third-order Decentralized Safe Consensus Protocol for Inter-connected Heterogeneous Cooperative Vehicular Platoons

In this paper, the stability analysis and control design of heterogeneous traffic flow is considered. It is assumed that the traffic flow consists of infinite number of cooperative non-identical vehicular platoons. Two different networks are investigated in stability analysis of heterogeneous traffic flow: 1) inter-platoon network which deals with the communication topology of lead vehicles and 2) intraplatoon network which deals with communication topology of individual platoons. The unidirectional communication topology is employed to describe the inter-platoon and intra-platoon networks topologies. By introducing a new decoupling approach, the 3N-order closed-loop dynamics of both networks is transformed to N third-order dynamical equations. Both inter-platoon and intra-platoon string stability are performed by presenting new approaches. Several simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.