Gap selection and dynamic speed profiles of interacting vehicles at on-ramps affect the safety and efficiency of highway merging sections. This paper puts forward a hierarchical control approach for Connected Automated Vehicles (CAVs) to achieve efficient and safe merging operations. A tactical layer controller employs a second-order car-following model with a cooperative merging mode to represent a cooperative merging process and generates an optimal vehicle merging sequence and time instants when on-ramp CAVs start to adapt their speeds and positions to prepare merging into the target gaps respectively. An operational layer controller is designed based on Model Predictive Control (MPC). It uses a third-order vehicle dynamics model and optimizes desired accelerations for CAVs and the time instants when the on-ramp CAVs initiate the lane-changing executions respectively. Both the tactical layer controller and operational layer controller derive their control commands by minimizing an objective function for different time horizons. The objective function penalizes deviations of CAVs' inter-vehicle gaps to their desired values, relative speeds to their direct predecessors, and actual or desired accelerations, subject to constraints on velocities, actual or desired accelerations, and inter-vehicle gaps. The performance of the proposed hierarchical control framework and a benchmark on-ramp merging method using a first-in-first-out rule to determine the merging sequence is demonstrated under 135 scenarios with different initial conditions, desired time gap settings, and numbers of on-ramp vehicles. The experimental results show the superiority of the hierarchical control approach.@en

Merging is a challenging task for automated vehicles. This paper proposes a strategy for connected automated vehicles (CAVs) to guide merging on-ramp vehicles efficiently while ensuring safe interactions with the mainline vehicles. Point-mass kinematic models are used to describe 2-D vehicle motion and receding horizon control is used to generate optimal trajectories of interacting vehicles. The strategy determines the optimal merging time instant for merging vehicles and acceleration of all involved vehicles to minimize deviation from the preceding vehicles' speed, deviation from preferred inter-vehicle gaps, accelerations, and the time spent merging. The strategy builds on a pre-determined order of vehicles passing the conflict zone but is not restricted to fixed merging points as previous research assumes. It resembles human-like behavior in the sense that on-ramp vehicles will accept smaller gaps when approaching the end of the acceleration lane. The performance of the strategy is demonstrated in simulations.

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Automated vehicles are designed to free drivers from driving tasks and are expected to improve traffic safety and efficiency when connected via vehicle-to-vehicle communication, that is, connected automated vehicles (CAVs). The time delays and model uncertainties in vehicle control systems pose challenges for automated driving in real world. Ignoring them may render the performance of cooperative driving systems unsatisfactory or even unstable. This paper aims to design a robust and flexible platooning control strategy for CAVs. A centralized control method is presented, where the leader of a CAV platoon collects information from followers, computes the desired accelerations of all controlled vehicles, and broadcasts the desired accelerations to followers. The robust platooning is formulated as a Min-Max Model Predictive Control (MM-MPC) problem, where optimal accelerations are generated to minimize the cost function under the worst case, where the worst case is taken over the possible models. The proposed method is flexible in such a way that it can be applied to both homogeneous platoon and heterogeneous platoon with mixed human-driven and automated controlled vehicles. A third-order linear vehicle model with fixed feedback delay and stochastic actuator lag is used to predict the platoon behavior. Actuator lag is assumed to vary randomly with unknown distributions but a known upper bound. The controller regulates platoon accelerations over a time horizon to minimize a cost function representing driving safety, efficiency, and ride comfort, subject to speed limits, plausible acceleration range, and minimal net spacing. The designed strategy is tested by simulating homogeneous and heterogeneous platoons in a number of typical and extreme scenarios to assess the system stability and performance. The test results demonstrate that the designed control strategy for CAV can ensure the robustness of stability and performance against model uncertainties and feedback delay and outperforms the deterministic MPC based platooning control.@en