CoOP: V2V-based Cooperative Overtaking for Platoons on Freeways

Platooning can improve road traffic safety, optimize traffic flows, and improve the driver's comfort. In order to enable platooning, V2V-concepts for platoon control, management, and safety have been developed. Cooperative maneuvers, such as overtaking for entire platoons, remain an open research problem. Such overtaking becomes necessary when we consider mixed traffic or platoons driving at different target speeds. In this paper, we propose CoOP, a V2V-based cooperative overtaking algorithm for platoons on freeways. Our CoOP concept enables safe overtaking maneuvers for entire platoons, i.e., without the need to disassemble and reassemble the platoon for the overtaking task. CoOP makes use of V2V communication - but does not limit itself to a specific technology. We validated safety and robustness of CoOP in a wide variety of simulated traffic scenarios. Our performance evaluation shows that CoOP performs well, even compared to the theoretic optimum of artificial platooning, although CoOP only relies on local information collected via direct V2V communication.