Impact of package delivery rate on the safety of highway vehicle platoons

Packet loss in block erasure channels creates a randomly switching networked system that impacts control performance significantly. This paper employs safety of highway vehicle platoons as a platform to study such impact. By autonomous inter-vehicle coordination, a platoon can potentially enhance safety, improve highway utility, increase fuel economy, and reduce emission. By comparing different information structures which utilize radar distance sensors and wireless communication channels, we are able to characterize some intrinsic relationships between communication resources and control performance. The findings of this paper provide useful guidelines on communication resource allocations and vehicle coordinations in vehicle safety problems.