Benefits of V2V Communication for Autonomous and Connected Vehicles
Provides theoretical bounds for improving traffic throughput and safety in autonomous vehicle platoons, relevant to transportation engineers and autonomous vehicle developers.
This paper quantifies how V2V communication reduces the minimum safe time headway in autonomous vehicle strings, showing that using information from r preceding vehicles can lower headway from 2τ₀ to 4τ₀/(1+r) or 2τ₀/(1+r) depending on data type.
In this paper, we investigate the benefits of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication for autonomous vehicles and provide results on how V2V information helps reduce employable time headway in the presence of parasitic lags. For a string of vehicles adopting a Constant Time Headway Policy (CTHP) and availing the on-board information of predecessor's vehicle position and velocity, the minimum employable time headway ($h_{\min}$) must be lower bounded by $2τ_0$ for string stability, where $τ_0$ is the maximum parasitic actuation lag. In this paper, we quantify the benefits of using V2V communication in terms of a reduction in the employable time headway: (1) If the position and velocity information of $r$ immediately preceding vehicles is used, then $h_{\min}$ can be reduced to ${4τ_0}/{(1+r)}$; (2) furthermore, if the acceleration of `$r$' immediately preceding vehicles is used, then $h_{\min}$ can be reduced to ${2τ_0}/{(1+r)}$; and (3) if the position, velocity and acceleration of the immediate and the $r$-th predecessors are used, then $h_{\min} \ge {2τ_0}/{(1+r)}$. Note that cases (2) and (3) provide the same lower bound on the minimum employable time headway; however, case (3) requires much less communicated information.