Risk of Collision and Detachment in Vehicle Platooning: Time-Delay-Induced Limitations and Trade-Offs (Extended Version)
For researchers in cooperative vehicle systems, this work provides fundamental risk limits and trade-offs, though it is incremental as it extends known platoon analysis to include stochastic noise and time-delay.
This paper quantifies collision and detachment risks in vehicle platoons with second-order dynamics, communication time-delay, and stochastic noise, deriving closed-form risk expressions and revealing that weakening network connectivity can paradoxically reduce risk.
We quantify the value-at-risk of inter-vehicle collision and detachment for a class of platoons, which are governed by second-order dynamics in presence of communication time-delay and exogenous stochastic noise. Closed-form expressions for the risk measures are obtained as functions of Laplacian eigen-spectrum as well as their fine explicit approximations using rational polynomial functions. We quantify several hard limits and fundamental tradeoffs among the risk measures, network connectivity, communication time-delay, and statistics of exogenous stochastic noise. Simultaneous presence of stochastic noise and time delay in a platoon imposes some idiosyncratic limitations on the behavior of collision and detachment risks, for instance, weakening (improving) network connectivity may result in lower (higher) levels of risk. Furthermore, a thorough risk analysis and comparison have been conducted for networks with specific graph topology. We support our theoretical findings via extensive simulations.