Altruistic Coordination Strategy for On-Ramp Merging on Highway of a Formation of Cooperative Automated Vehicles

It is getting increasingly recognized that, to get full advantage from Automated Vehicles (AVs), a number of situations involving multiple AVs will compulsory require the coordination of their relative activities and movements. Under the Multi-Vehicle Systems (MVS) paradigm, instead of considering individually each AV, it is proposed to create with several AVs a group that evolves under a certain coordination strategy. In this paper, it is proposed to utilize Cooperative Automated Vehicles (CAVs) synchronization ability to tackle one challenging scenario: on-ramp merging on highway. The main contribution of this paper is an overall collaborative approach, called Altruistic Formation Reconfiguration Strategy (AFRS), based on a multi-criteria optimization, to guarantee the safety and the energetic efficiency of CAVs, performing on-ramp merging on highway. Under the AFRS, it is proposed the extension of the Constrained Optimal Reconfiguration Matrix (CORM) [1] in order to overcome the CORM limitations, while guarantying both the CAV’s non-collision requirement and the smooth collaborative navigation of the fleet. Several simulations are performed to evaluate the safety and reliability of the proposed approach.