A suggestion-based hierarchical energy efficient control framework for connected and automated vehicles in mixed stream urban road networks

Abstract

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) and their advanced control systems have the ability to improve energy efficiency and mobility of the transportation system, but hundred percent market penetration of CAVs will not happen in the near future. CAVs are thus expected to share the road with human-driven vehicles (HDVs), which can act in suboptimal manners. Since vehicles on road constitute an interactive system, where actions of one vehicle influence the actions of its surrounding vehicles, suboptimal behavior of HDVs affect all their surrounding vehicles including the CAVs. This paper thus focuses on the development of a suggestion-based control framework for CAVs in interactive mixed traffic environments. Our mixed traffic environment includes both CAVs and connected HDVs that have vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication capabilities. In this suggestion-based control framework, a CAV is considered to provide velocity and lane-change suggestions to multiple surrounding HDVs to follow. These suggestions are the velocities and lane-change actions the CAV wants the HDVs to follow to improve its own and the group’s energy efficiency and mobility. To take into account the interactive nature of the environment, the CAV is considered to jointly plan its own trajectory, evaluate the suggestions to the surrounding HDVs, and predict the actions of its surrounding vehicles. The joint planning requires solving the problem in joint state- and action-space, and in this paper, we develop a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based trajectory planning approach for the CAV. Since the joint action- and state-space grows exponentially with the number of agents and can be computationally expensive, we propose an adaptive action-space by pruning the actions resulting in unsafe trajectories for each agent. The trajectory planning approach is followed by a low-level model predictive control (MPC)-based motion controller, which aims at tracking the reference trajectory in an optimal fashion. Simulation studies show the proposed control strategy’s efficacy compared with existing baseline methods. Simulation studies show improvements in fuel efficiency ranging from 4% to 50% for HDVs and from 1% to 30% for the CAV compared to the baseline.