Lane Change in Automated Driving: An Explicit Coordination Strategy

We address a multi-vehicle automated driving scenario, where a vehicle has to change lane and merge in a platoon in a one-way roadway with two lanes. We focus on the coordination phase of the lane change, where vehicles in the platoon need to create a gap for the merging vehicle to enter safely following a pre-computed optimal trajectory. The goal is pre-computing also the multi-vehicle coordination strategy, so as to limit the computational and communication effort involved in its online implementation. This is achieved by considering the platoon as if it was composed of an infinite number of vehicles and solving a multi-parametric optimization program providing the coordination strategy as an explicit function of position and velocity of the ego vehicle, integrating a multi-class classifier to identify the best merging position. Numerical simulations show that the resulting performance degradation when implementing the strategy on a finite platoon is limited to boundary effects at its head and tail.