Welcome to Journal of Automotive Safety and Energy,

Journal of Automotive Safety and Energy ›› 2026, Vol. 17 ›› Issue (3): 369-379.DOI: 10.3969/j.issn.1674-8484.2026.03.009

• Intelligent Driving and Intelligent Transportation • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Collaborative control and safety analysis of connected and automated vehicles based on hybrid car-following strategy

ZHENG Yuan1,2(), YU Wenhao1,2, LI Shen3,*(), LIU Yang4, CHEN Tianyi5, LI Meng3, RAN Bin2   

  1. 1 Modern Urban Transportation Technology Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center, Nanjing 211189, China
    2 School of Transportation, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China
    3 Department of Traffic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
    4 School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
    5 JiangSu Communications Holding Digital Transportation Research Institute Co., Ltd, Nanjing 210019, China
  • Received:2025-10-22 Revised:2026-04-20 Online:2026-06-30 Published:2026-07-02

Abstract:

A novel cooperative control method for CAVs was proposed based on a hybrid car-following strategy to improve the traffic safety of the connected and automated vehicle (CAV) platoons using the constant spacing (CS) strategy in terms of the rear-end collisions. Specifically, the leader adopted the constant time gap (CTG) strategy while the followers used the CS strategy, the car-following control models were formulated based on the linear feedback and feedforward controllers, and the sufficient conditions of the string stability were derived. Numerical experiments were conducted and the results show that the proposed hybrid strategy reduces rear-end collision risks by more than 93% for a single platoon and 97% for two platoons under a time-to-collision threshold (TTCT) of 3.0 s compared with the pure CS strategy. All rear-end collision risks can be eliminated for both a CAV platoon and two CAV platoons when the TTCT is set at 2.0 s. The implementation of the hybrid car-following strategy for platooning of CAVs improves travel efficiency by 39% compared to the pure CTG strategy. Therefore, the proposed strategy provides a theoretical support for the car-following controls and safety improvements of the CAV platoons.

Key words: traffic engineering, traffic safety, rear-end collision risk, connected and automated vehicle (CAV) platoon, hybrid policy-based control, constant spacing (CS), constant time gap (CTG)

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