Digital Twin Empowered Mobile Edge Computing for Intelligent Vehicular Lane-Changing

With automated driving forthcoming, lane-changing for Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) has received wide attention. The main challenge is that lane-changing requires not only local CAV control but also interactions with the surrounding traffic. Nevertheless, the Line-of-Sight (LoS) sensing range of the CAVs imposes severe limitations on lane-changing safety, and the lane-changing decision that is made based only on self-interest ignores its impact on the traffic flow efficiency. To overcome these difficulties, this article proposes a Digital Twin (DT) empowered mobile edge computing (MEC) architecture. With MEC, the sensing and computing capabilities of the CAVs can be strengthened to guarantee real-time safety. The virtualization and offline learning capabilities of the DT can be leveraged to enable the CAVs to learn from the experience of the physical MEC network and make lane-changing decisions via a ‘foresight intelligent’ approach. A case study of lane-changing is provided where the DT is constituted by a cellular automata based road traffic simulator coupled with a LTE-V based MEC network simulator. Deep reinforcement learning is adopted to train the lane-changing strategy and results validate the effectiveness of our proposed architecture.