Real-time heterogeneous multi-vehicle simulator for platoon control

This paper presents a real-time multi-vehicle simulator with an initial delay. The main focus of the developed simulator is to show any effects of different vehicle dynamics or different controllers on the platoon string stability. For this heterogeneous multi-vehicle simulation, a detailed powertrain model, a detailed brake model, and several kinds of longitudinal controllers are implemented in the developed simulator. A network configuration connecting individual vehicle simulators via TCP/IP is adopted for real-time simulation and a simple wait-and-go algorithm is used for dealing with a random transfer delay, which results in just an initial delay.