%0 Journal Article %T Third-order Decentralized Safe Consensus Protocol for Inter-connected Heterogeneous Vehicular Platoons %J International Journal of Engineering %I Materials and Energy Research Center %Z 1025-2495 %A Chehardoli, H. %A Homaienezhad, M. %D 2018 %\ 06/01/2018 %V 31 %N 6 %P 967-972 %! Third-order Decentralized Safe Consensus Protocol for Inter-connected Heterogeneous Vehicular Platoons %K Traffic Flow %K Inter %K platoon Stability %K Intra %K Time Delay %K String Stability %R 10.5829/ije.2018.31.06c.14 %X In this paper, the stability analysis and control design of heterogeneous traffic flow is considered. It is assumed that the traffic flow consists of infinite number of cooperative non-identical vehicular platoons. Two different networks are investigated in stability analysis of heterogeneous traffic flow: 1) inter-platoon network which deals with the communication topology of lead vehicles and 2) intra-platoon network which deals with communication topology of individual platoons. The unidirectional communication topology is employed to describe the inter-platoon and intra-platoon networks topologies. By introducing a new decoupling approach, the 3N-order closed-loop dynamics of both networks is transformed to N third-order dynamical equations. Both inter-platoon and intra-platoon string stability are performed by presenting new approaches. Several simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. %U https://www.ije.ir/article_73204_1de845f7467740acaacb6d3c77d88e08.pdf