The fulfillment of the main goal stated for the project relies on a set of specific objectives that aim at solving the problems arising in vehicle platooning, due to networking, hardware and plant constraints and drive disturbances (weather conditions and road configuration):

• Objective 1: modeling framework for distributed vehicle platoons which is able to include the couplings between the vehicles and the wireless communication and hardware/ computational constraints: starting from the existing techniques of modeling network-induced time-varying delays using polytopic approximations or as disturbances, the effect of the delays will be translated into polyhedral partitions of the state-space; moreover, the hardware/computational constraints will be translated into polyhedral partitions of the state-space; furthermore, the two methods will be integrated so as to obtain a realistic model of the vehicle platoon with vehicle couplings, time-varying delays and hardware/computational constraints;


• Objective 2: developing framework for agent-based distributed predictive controllers which are able to use the modeling framework from the first objective and to take into account the weather conditions (e.g., driving on dry, wet or icy roads) and road configuration (e.g, driving uphill or downhill); yields predictive control laws based on PLFs which will be tested in a simulation environment developed in Matlab for cooperative vehicle platoons;


• Objective 3: development of real-time software for implementing the designed agent-based distributed predictive control algorithms on embedded systems which will be experimentally tested on a lab-scale vehicle platoon (platoon of mobile robots); a performance analysis and comparison with state-of-art platoon controllers will also be performed.