California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This is the first of two reports in which we detail the accomplishments and findings of a two-year research project aimed at determining control and spacing strategies as well as developing performance issues for automated vehicles traveling in platoons under non-uniform conditions. The first phase of the research was geared toward determining parameter uncertainty ranges for a given model and expected disturbances that materially affect the behavior of a vehicle in a platoon. Once this was completed, the relevant criteria for determining platoon performance were investigated. A simulation code was then written to evaluate platoon performance for a variety of platooning scenarios.