A multiclass microscopic model for heterogeneous platoon with vehicle-to-vehicle communication

Connected and autonomous (CA) vehicles have been verified to significantly improve traffic efficiency. However, there is still a long lifespan for heterogeneous traffic flow consisting of both human-driven and CA vehicles. Thus a deep understanding of the heterogeneous platoon dynamics is critical to the traffic stability issues for the deployment of CA vehicles in the near future. This paper aims to develop a multiclass microscopic model for a heterogeneous platoon which can explicitly demonstrate the interaction between human-driven and CA vehicles. Specifically, the consensus-based control algorithm is adopted to model the dynamics of CA vehicles and a typical car-following model is used to describe the dynamics of human-driven vehicles. We then theoretically and numerically study the linear stability condition of the heterogeneous platoon which takes into account the probabilistic delay in the communication, the penetration of the CA vehicles, and the relative order of the vehicle types in the platoon.