Research on cooperative adaptive cruise control systems under communication failures

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) systems have emerged as effective solutions to mitigate traffic accidents, congestion, energy waste, and environmental pollution. However, existing CACC systems primarily rely on idealized communication assumptions and rarely consider the possibility of communication failures. Therefore, it is essential to explore appropriate safety measures for handling communication failure scenarios to ensure system reliability and robustness. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a degradable CACC strategy based on H ∞ control. Initially, a mathematical model was developed for the CACC control problem. The controller is composed of a feedforward controller, based on inter-vehicle communication, and a feedback controller grounded in H ∞ control theory. Specifically, the feedforward control input is formulated as a weighted combination of the desired accelerations from both the preceding and leading vehicles, aiming to enhance responsiveness to dynamic maneuvers of neighboring vehicles. Meanwhile, the feedback control input regards the feedforward component as a disturbance, thus ensuring system stability even under scenarios such as communication latency, packet loss, or measurement errors through robust disturbance rejection capabilities. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the designed CACC controller exhibits excellent performance under normal operating conditions and retains high performance even when faced with initial errors and communication failures; this allows the platoon to quickly return to formation, ensuring the safety and comfort of the following vehicles. Furthermore, a comparison with the conventional CACC controller shows that the designed CACC controller outperforms the conventional CACC controller in terms of platoon consistency, robustness, and stability.