Coordination of Connected Vehicles on Merging Roads Using Pseudo-Perturbation-Based Broadcast Control

Abstract

This paper proposes a coordination method for vehicles on merging roads to realize smooth traffic merging. The proposed method can be implemented with a low communication volume in an environment in which the automated/connected vehicles and manually operated vehicles are mixed. The method is based on a pseudo-perturbation-based broadcast controller (PBC), which has the potential to coordinate multiple vehicles with low-cost V2I communication without V2V communication. The PBC indiscriminately broadcasts an identical signal to the vehicles. The volume of such a broadcast communication is less than that of the commonly used unicast communication. This paper overcomes the following three issues to apply the PBC to the traffic merging problem. First, the time-invariant metrics are derived to design a time-invariant objective function corresponding to the traffic merging problem because the PBC is based on the minimization of such a time-invariant function. Second, a (locally) convex objective function to be globally minimized is designed. Finally, the collision avoidance between vehicles is guaranteed. The microscopic traffic simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PBC-based coordination method in the presence of uncooperative manually operated vehicles.