Privacy-preserving-based adaptive sliding mode fault-tolerant cooperative control for heterogeneous vehicular platoon systems with external disturbances and fading channels

This paper investigates the privacy-preserving-based sliding mode fault-tolerant cooperative control problem for network-connected heterogeneous vehicle platoon systems subject to external disturbances, fading channels, and actuator faults. To improve the control performance of the vehicle platoon systems (VPSs), a predictive spacing strategy is adopted, which transforms the platoon stability problem into a leader-follower consensus problem by introducing a new variable. Since the VPSs share vehicle states through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) wireless communication, this may lead to privacy leaks and susceptibility to cyber attacks. An output mask-based privacy preservation mechanism is designed to prevent the leakage of initial states for each vehicle. In addition, this mechanism does not degrade the precision of car-following performance during the transmission of encrypted information. Considering that VPSs are subjected to external disturbances, fading channels, and actuator faults, this increases the complexity of controller design and system stability analysis. To address this challenge, a novel adaptive sliding mode fault-tolerant consensus control scheme based on output mask privacy mechanism is proposed for the VPSs. Then, by constructing an integral sliding surface for each follower vehicle and applying input-to-state stability theory, a sufficient condition is derived to ensure the consensus errors ultimately converge to zero along the sliding surface, thereby achieving asymptotic stability of the VPSs. The control scheme can also guarantee the string stability. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control method is confirmed through numerical simulations and comparisons.