A concept of “car in a virtual moving cell” platoon construction on an automated highway system

The point following method controls the vehicle so that it follows a virtual reference point that is moving along the road. The control system in the vehicle is simpler than the one in the car-following method, but it needs an infrastructure on the roadside to provide reference points along the road. As an extension of this method, a moving cell control scheme was proposed, in which the reference point is given in a cell and a vehicle is controlled so that it remains in the cell moving along the road. This paper proposes a platoon control method as an extension of the moving cell control scheme. This method enables us to create a platoon controller that does not generate a dilatational wave, consisting of a simple PID controller using a simple form of communication from the preceding vehicle to the following vehicle, we call this method “car in a virtual moving cell”