{"ID":2841404,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12336","arxiv_id":"2511.12336","title":"Safe and Operationally Efficient Longitudinal Control of Autonomous Truck Platoons","abstract":"This paper presents a hierarchical longitudinal control architecture for autonomous truck platoons that jointly addresses safety, string stability, and economic efficiency. The framework integrates a high-rate safety projection filter, a spacing-regulation layer based on a lag-aware proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller, and a slow-timescale economic optimizer balancing fuel consumption and travel time. The safety layer guarantees collision avoidance under bounded actuation delays by enforcing forward invariance of a velocity-aware headway constraint through a high-order control barrier function. The regulation layer shapes the spacing-error dynamics into a second-order form with interpretable parameters for damping and natural frequency while explicitly accounting for actuator lag. At the macroscopic level, fuel use is modeled by a tractive-power relation that captures aerodynamic benefits of close spacing, enabling a long-term optimization of speed trajectories subject to comfort and energy trade-offs. We show that the closed-loop dynamics converge to the Optimal Velocity Model with Relative Velocity (OVRV) under undisturbed conditions and derive worst-case upper bounds for platoon stabilization time. Numerical case studies demonstrate the superiority of the proposed design over an canonical baseline controllers in both transient behavior and long-term energy efficiency.","short_abstract":"This paper presents a hierarchical longitudinal control architecture for autonomous truck platoons that jointly addresses safety, string stability, and economic efficiency. The framework integrates a high-rate safety projection filter, a spacing-regulation layer based on a lag-aware proportional-integral-derivative (PI...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12336","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.12336v1","authors":"[\"Alexander Hammerl\",\"Ravi Seshadri\",\"Thomas Kjær Rasmussen\",\"Otto Anker Nielsen\"]","published":"2025-11-15T19:30:36Z","proceeding":"math.OC","tasks":"[\"math.OC\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}