Abstract
Nowadays, the public roads are getting more congested than ever, with the increase of vehicle numbers. As such, the necessity of improving the traffic flow, while maintaining the passengers comfort is paramount. In this context, a vehicle platoon, defined as a group of different vehicles, which travel with the same velocity and maintain a prescribed inter-vehicle distance, is considered by the control community as an accepted control solution for efficient traveling. This work provides a selfish coalitional control algorithm suitable for a vehicle platooning application, which is a particular case of a networked system composed of multiple sub-systems (or vehicles), which share information via a communication network. The main idea behind the coalitional control is to design a dynamic communication network, in which the communication links between the agents (which control each vehicle) are enabled or disabled, according to the selected communication topology. Moreover, a selfish approach is envisioned, in which each agent is allowed to switch between the communication topologies and to choose its own, most beneficial one, while ensuring the optimality of the entire vehicle platoon. The control algorithm was tested in simulation, on a five vehicle, heterogeneous platoon, and the results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.