Abstract
Currently, the increase of transport demands along with the limited capacity of the road network have increased traffic congestion in urban and highway scenarios. Technologies such as Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) emerge as efficient solutions. However, a higher level of cooperation among multiple vehicle platoons is needed to improve, effectively, the traffic flow. In this paper, a global solution to merge two platoons is presented. This approach combines: (i) a longitudinal controller based on a feed-back/feed-forward architecture focusing on providing CACC capacities and (ii) hybrid trajectory planning to merge platooning on straight paths. Experiments were performed using Tecnalia’s previous basis. These are the AUDRIC modular architecture for automated driving and the highly reliable simulation environment DYNACAR. A simulation test case was conducted using five vehicles, two of them executing the merging and three opening the gap to the upcoming vehicles. The results showed the good performance of both domains, longitudinal and lateral, merging multiple vehicles while ensuring safety and comfort and without propagating speed changes.
Highlights
Traffic jams in urban or highway scenarios are complex environments for implementing automated driving functionalities due to the multiple interactions with the surrounding vehicles
Traffic congestion is defined as the mutual obstruction of vehicles due to the existing interrelation among the vehicles’ speed and traffic flows [1]
The vehicles in Platoon A are numbered as even numbers (Vehicles 2 and 4), while vehicles in Platoon B are numbered as odd numbers (Vehicles 1, 3, and 5)
Summary
Traffic jams in urban or highway scenarios are complex environments for implementing automated driving functionalities due to the multiple interactions with the surrounding vehicles. It is common to have traffic congestion in the metropolitan areas with a high level of socioeconomic development [2]. Traffic jams are triggered by situations such as lane merging, sharp cut-ins, or bottlenecks. Once triggered, these disturbances are propagated in the upstream direction as traffic shock waves. These disturbances are propagated in the upstream direction as traffic shock waves Such phenomena are explained by the fact that human drivers perform a string of unstable car-following because they tend to keep shorter inter-vehicle distances than they should, given human’s reaction capabilities [3]
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