Nonlinear dynamics of connected vehicle systems with communication delays

In this paper, we investigate effects of communication delays on the nonlinear dynamics of connected vehicle systems. Our modeling framework incorporates communication delays, which arise from the intermittency and packet drops in wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Plant stability and string stability are used to characterize the system-level performance of vehicle networks. Delay-dependent stability conditions are derived based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii theorem and then visualized by using stability diagrams. Numerical simulations are used to validate the stability diagrams and to demonstrate that bistability can be avoided by utilizing the nonlinear stability analysis presented in this paper.