Time and Energy-Optimal Lane Change Maneuvers for Cooperating Connected Automated Vehicles
This work addresses the need for efficient and safe lane change maneuvers for CAVs, a key challenge in autonomous driving.
The paper derives optimal control policies for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) performing highway lane changes, minimizing maneuver time and energy consumption while ensuring safety. Simulations show significant performance improvements over human-driven maneuvers.
We derive optimal control policies for a Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) cooperating with neighboring CAVs to implement a highway lane change maneuver. We optimize the maneuver time and subsequently minimize the associated energy consumption of all cooperating vehicles in this maneuver. We prove structural properties of the optimal policies which simplify the solution derivations and lead to analytical optimal control expressions. The solutions, when they exist, are guaranteed to satisfy safety constraints for all vehicles involved in the maneuver. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed solution and significant performance improvements compared to maneuvers performed by human-driven vehicles.