Recent developments in vehicle onboard computers and vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology allow automatic control of vehicles and the organization of vehicles into platoons with short intraplatoon distances. One of the major issues with platoon control is latency in wireless communications. Latency has a negative impact on safety and disrupts the stability of platoons. A decentralized longitudinal platoon-controlling mechanism that uses a model predictive control approach to control vehicles safely, even in harsh communications environments, is proposed. The sensitivity of this method was analyzed to derive the conditions for this method to work safely. A simulation test bed for this control method was implemented to test effectiveness and safety under two communications latency settings. The results showed that the model predictive control method could safely control the platoon even in harsh communications environments.
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