Paper Info
Title
Cooperative Formation of Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic Flow: Beyond Platooning
Abstract
Cooperative formation and control of autonomous vehicles (AVs) promise increased efficiency and safety on public roads. In single-lane mixed traffic consisting of AVs and human-driven vehicles (HDVs), the prevailing platooning of multiple AVs is not the only choice for cooperative formation. In this paper, we investigate how different formations of AVs impact traffic performance from a set-function optimization perspective. We first reveal a stability invariance property and a diminishing improvement property of noncooperative formation when AVs adopt an independently designed Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) strategy. Then, we focus on the case of cooperative formation where AVs utilize a centralized optimal controller. We further investigate the corresponding optimal formation of multiple AVs using set-function optimization. Two predominant optimal formations, i.e., uniform distribution and platoon formation, emerge from extensive numerical experiments. Interestingly, platooning might have the least potential to improve traffic performance when HDVs have poor string stability behavior. These results suggest more opportunities for cooperative formation of AVs, beyond platooning, in practical mixed traffic flow.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TITS.2022.3146612
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Optimization, Perturbation methods, Vehicle dynamics, Numerical stability, Autonomous vehicles, Actuators, Stability criteria, Autonomous vehicle, cooperative formation, vehicle platooning, mixed traffic flow
Journal
23
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
9
1524-9050
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Keqiang Li158352.39
Jiawei Wang200.34
Yang Zheng326718.67