A survey on platoon-based vehicular cyber-physical systems

Vehicles on the road with some common interests can cooperatively form a platoon-based driving pattern, in which a vehicle follows another vehicle and maintains a small and nearly constant distance to the preceding vehicle. It has been proved that, compared with driving individually, such a platoon-based driving pattern can significantly improve road capacity and energy efficiency. Moreover, with the emerging vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), the performance of a platoon in terms of road capacity, safety, energy efficiency, etc., can be further improved. On the other hand, the physical dynamics of vehicles inside the platoon can also affect the performance of a VANET. Such a complex system can be considered a platoon-based vehicular cyber-physical system (VCPS), which has attracted significant attention recently. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on a platoon-based VCPS. We first review the related work of a platoon-based VCPS. We then introduce two elementary techniques involved in a platoon-based VCPS, i.e., the vehicular networking architecture and standards, and traffic dynamics, respectively. We further discuss the fundamental issues in a platoon-based VCPS, including vehicle platooning/clustering, cooperative adaptive cruise control, platoon-based vehicular communications, etc., all of which are characterized by the tightly coupled relationship between traffic dynamics and VANET behaviors. Since system verification is critical to VCPS development, we also give an overview of VCPS simulation tools. Finally, we share our view on some open issues that may lead to new research directions.