Towards Optimal Lane-Changing Coordination of CAVs in Multi-Lane Mixed Traffic Scenarios

Lane changing is a fundamental but challenging operation for moving vehicles. Connected and Automated Vehicles(CAVs) enable autonomous vehicles to cooperate with each other to accomplish the lane changing tasks, profiting from their communication ability. However, dispatching CAVs in mixed traffic remains difficult due to the stochastic behaviors and uncertain intentions of Human-Driven Vehicles(HDVs). To tackle this issue, this paper devises a coordination approach based on Conflict-Based Search(CBS) theory. Firstly, HDVs are accurately modeled as constraints to enable usage of CBS in the mixed traffic. Additionally, virtual goals are introduced to search CAVs’ priority and outlets along with path finding. Furthermore, we optimize the performance of CBS in dense traffic by defining the concept of following vehicles. Experiments show that performance is improved by utilizing new conflict prioritizing rules and a heuristic value calculation method that derived from following vehicles. Finally, we introduce grouping vehicles to extend the proposed method for solving extremely dense and large instances at a scale of more than one hundred without significant loss in efficiency.