California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This report deals with an introduction to the control aspect of platoon maneuvers in Automated Highway Systems. The different platoon maneuvers include lane changes, merge procedures and split procedures. The first part of the report consists of a review of the existing literature in this area. The survey is split up into the quasi-synchronous and vehicle follower controller methods of approach to the problem. The subsequent sections deal with the mathematical description of the problem with two representations of the system under study, varying only in level of model complexity. The simplified model has been studied with a linear based control as well as the nonlinear sliding mode approach. The results only reinforce the need for nonlinear systems analysis and control. The sliding control technique has also been applied to study the detailed version of the plant.