Hierarchical Design for Connected Cruise Control

In this paper, we propose a hierarchical framework to reduce the design complexity of connected cruise control (CCC), which is used to regulate the longitudinal motion of a vehicle by utilizing wireless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. A high-level controller is designed to generate desired motion of the CCC vehicle based on the motion of multiple vehicles ahead. A low-level controller is used to regulate the engine torque and select the appropriate gear to enable the vehicle to track the desired motion. To cope with external disturbances and uncertain physical parameters, we use an adaptive control strategy for the low-level controller. In a case study, we design a specific CCC algorithm by using the presented hierarchical framework. Numerical simulations are used to validate the analytical results and test the system performance.