A Cooperative Lane Change Model for Connected and Automated Vehicles

The emerging technology of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication makes it possible for vehicles to sense the environment information, which can be exploited to assist the vehicle in cooperative motion planning. In this paper, we focus on the cooperative trajectory planning of lane changes for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). The proposed model considers the traffic scene with multiple mandatory lane change demands and completes the trajectory planning for vehicles by taking the safety and efficiency into consideration. The model solves two critical issues: the vehicle grouping and the motion planning. In the first issue, CAVs in the cooperative zone are divided into different groups. Then the problem is simplified and divided into several subproblems. In the second issue, the trajectory planning is conducted in each group. Trajectories are generated for vehicles with and without lane change demands. Besides, these two steps are iterated and updated in the fixed time interval, which makes full use of the dynamic cooperation ability of vehicles. Extensive simulation tests are conducted to validate the performance of the model. Results show that the cooperation of vehicles realizes safe and effective lane changes.