Attack Resilient Heterogeneous Vehicle Platooning Using Secure Distributed Nonlinear Model Predictive Control

Recently, vehicle platoons have offered significant enhancements in traffic management, energy consumption and safety in intelligent transportation systems. Despite the benefits brought by the platoons, they potentially suffer from insecure networks which provide the connectivity among the vehicles participating in the platoon. This paper deals with the secure control of vehicle platoons under the risk of a common cyber attack, namely Denial of Service (DoS) attack. A DoS intruder can endanger the security of platoon by jamming the communication network among the vehicles which is responsible to transmit inter-vehicular data throughout the platoon. This can potentially result in huge performance degradation or even hazardous collisions. We propose a secure distributed nonlinear model predictive control algorithm consisting of i) detection and ii) mitigation phases. The algorithm is capable of handling DoS attack performed on a platoon equipped by different communication topologies and at the same time it guarantees the desired formation control performance. Stability analysis of the attacked platoon running the given algorithm is also presented. Simulation results on a sample heterogeneous attacked platoon exploiting two-predecessor follower communication environment demonstrates the effectiveness of the method.