Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control with Variable Time Headway for Graceful Degradation under Fluctuating Network Quality of Service
This work addresses a critical safety issue for autonomous and connected vehicles by enabling robust operation in real-world network variability, though it is incremental as it builds on existing CACC frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of maintaining safe and stable vehicle following in Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) under fluctuating network quality, proposing a dynamic distance adaptation method that adjusts time headway to ensure graceful degradation, validated through simulation and experiments.
This paper proposes a dynamic distance adaptation for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) under time-varying network conditions. When the Quality of Service (QoS) drops below a level required to maintain desired inter-vehicle distances, an online adaptation of the reference distances, reflected by a change of the time headway factor, becomes necessary. We present a control design algorithm realizing a graceful degradation, for which a distance control to a virtual preceding vehicle is introduced. Furthermore, the Integral Quadratic Constraints (IQC) framework is applied to guarantee robust stability of the time-varying system. The concept is validated in simulation and experimentally using small-scale test vehicles.