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Real-time control of a fleet of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV) for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is a challenging problem concerning time delays (from sensing, communication, and computation) and actuator lag. This paper proposes a real-time predictive distributed CACC control framework that addresses time delays and actuator lag issues in the real-time networked control systems. We first formulate a Kalman Filter-based real-time current driving state prediction model to provide more accurate initial conditions for the distributed CACC controller by compensating time delays using sensing data from multi-rate onboard sensors (e.g., Radar, GPS, wheel speed, and accelerometer), and status-sharing and intent-sharing data in BSM via V2V communication. We solve the prediction model using a sequential Kalman Filter update process for multi-rate sensing data to improve computational efficiency. We propose a real-time distributed MPC-based CACC controller with actuator lag and intent-sharing information for each CAV with the delay-compensated predicted current driving states as initial conditions. We implement the real-time predictive distributed CACC control algorithms and conduct numerical analyses to demonstrate the benefits of intent-sharing-based distributed computing, delay compensation, and actuator lag consideration on string stability under various traffic dynamics. 

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is one of the popular connected and automated vehicle (CAV) applications for cooperative driving automation with combined connectivity and automation technologies to improve string stability. This study aimed to derive the string stability conditions of a CACC controller and analyze the impacts of CACC on string stability for both a fleet of homogeneous CAVs and for heterogeneous traffic with human-driven vehicles (HDVs), connected vehicles (CVs) with connectivity technologies only, and autonomous vehicles (AVs) with automation technologies only. We mathematically analyzed the impact of CACC on string stability for both homogeneous and heterogeneous traffic flow. We adopted parameters from literature for HDVs, CVs, and AVs for the heterogeneous traffic case. We found there was a minimum constant time headway required for each parameter design to ensure stability in homogeneous CACC traffic. In addition, the constant time headway and the length of control time interval had positive correlation with stability, but the control parameter had a negative correlation with stability. The numerical analysis also showed that CACC vehicles could maintain string stability better than CVs and AVs under low HDV market penetration rates for the mixed traffic case.