This paper considers a velocity control problem for merging and splitting maneuvers of vehicle platoons. In this paper, an external device sends velocity commands to some vehicles in the platoon, and the others adjust their velocities autonomously. The former is pinning control, and the latter is consensus control in multi-agent control. We propose a switched pinning control algorithm. Our algorithm consists of three sub-methods. The first is an optimal switching method of pinning agents based on an MLD (Mixed Logical Dynamical) system model and MPC (Model Predictive Control). The second is a representation method for dynamical platoon formation with merging and splitting maneuver. The platoon formation follows the positional relation between vehicles or the formation demand from the external device. The third is a switching reduction method by setting a cost function that penalizes the switching of the pinning agents in the steady-state. Our proposed algorithm enables us to improve the consensus speed. Moreover, our algorithm can regroup the platoons to the arbitrary platoons and control the velocities of the multiple vehicle platoons to each target value.

Many controllers are implemented on digital platforms as periodic control tasks. But, in embedded systems, an amount of resources are limited and the reduction of resource utilization of the control task is an important issue. Recently, much attention has been paid to a self-triggered controller, which updates control inputs aperiodically. A control task by which the self-triggered controller is implemented skips the release of jobs if the degradation of control performances by the skipping can be allowed. Each job computes not only the updated control inputs but also the next update instant and the control task is in the sleep state until the instant. Thus the resource utilization is reduced. In this paper, we consider self-triggered predictive control (stPC) of mixed logical dynamical (MLD) systems. We introduce a binary variable which determines whether the control inputs are updated or not. Then, we formulate an stPC problem of mixed logical dynamical systems, where activation costs are time-dependent to represent the preference of activations of the control task. Both the control inputs and the next update instant are computed by solving a mixed integer programming problem. The proposed stPC can reduce the number of updates with guaranteeing stability of the controlled system.