| The concept of platooning in an Automated Highway System (AHS) allows a group of vehicles to share information across a wireless local area network (LAN). This sharing of information allows vehicles belonging to the same platoon to maintain a smaller inter-vehicular spacing that would otherwise be possible. Of course, once these platoon/LANs exist on the AHS, a method must exist to add vehicles to a platoon and also to remove vehicles from a platoon. This dissertation investigates both the control laws needed to perform these two longitudinal maneuvers and a handshaking protocol that would allow the reconfiguration of the LAN to reflect the changes in the platoon(s) that result.; A single vehicle traveling along an AHS may be called upon to play many roles on any given trip along the highway. It may need to be a platoon leader, a follower in a platoon, or both at different times. It may also need to join an existing platoon, or to separate itself from one. These multiple tasks create a situation that is ideally suited for a hybrid control law. Many of the components of this hybrid controller have already been developed, such as the follower mode, and the transitional join and split modes. This dissertation develops a hybrid nonlinear lead vehicle controller to add to the three previously mentioned controllers, and combines them into a single hybrid control law. String stability is then shown not only for each component in the hybrid control law, but for a single-lane AHS consisting of multiple platoons.; This dissertation also develops handshaking protocols that allow the LANs associated with each platoon to reconfigure themselves in response to any physical changes to the composition of the platoon. Since the LANs operate over a wireless communication system, these protocols are designed to be robust towards packet losses, as well as satisfying certain safety and liveness conditions. Since the control and protocol components must work together to achieve a platoon join or split, the software that implements these two components is structured to interact through the use of software flags, indicating the desired control mode and the state of any transition control modes. This approach also modularizes the controllers and maneuver protocols, enabling the development of the controllers and maneuver protocols to occur independently of each other. |
