Balancing Safety and Traffic Throughput in Cooperative Vehicle Platooning

In this paper we propose a distributed model predictive control architecture to coordinate the longitudinal motion of a vehicle platoon at a signalized intersection. Our control approach is cooperative; we use vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication in order to maintain small inter-vehicle distances and correspondingly achieve large vehicle throughput at an intersection. We study the trade-off between safety and road throughput for this problem. In particular, we present the link between traffic efficiency gains in terms of throughput, and safety of the connected platoon measured as trust on the predicted speed profile of other vehicles in the network.