Delay Compensation Control of Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons: A Principal–Agent Structure

This article proposes a principal–agent cooperative adaptive cruise control (PA-CACC) framework that integrates with the Smith predictor (SP) to simultaneously deal with actuator and communication delays for heterogeneous vehicle platoons. Theoretical analysis indicates that the proposed PA-CACC controller can substantially reduce the minimum time headway to the sum of actuator and communication delays while overcoming the impact of initial errors. Comprehensive comparison studies have been conducted to compare the performance of the proposed PA-CACC scheme with the state-of-the-art methods including a-CACC and SP-based CACC. The results show that the proposed PA-CACC method outperforms the other two approaches and presents a robust solution to time-varying delays and parameter uncertainty. These underscore the effectiveness of the proposed method to enhance traffic efficiency and stability for heterogeneous vehicle platoons.