Effect of leader information broadcasted throughout vehicle platoon in a constant spacing policy

The constant spacing policy is a strategy to design longitudinal controller for vehicle platoon. The inter-vehicle spacing distances are set to be constant between consecutive cars in the platoon and independence with vehicle speed. The additional communication link in cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) structure, make it worth to be revisited to study the improvement that can be offered. The unstable string behavior of this strategy can be overcome with this new communication structure. In this paper, we use one of the communication structure, with leading vehicle speed and acceleration information been broadcasted throughout the platoon. The simulation result in homogenous traffic scenario has been presented and the performance of this structure has been analyzed. The improvement in string stability and small inter-vehicle spacing distance has also been discussed.