A cooperative lane change model for connected and autonomous vehicles on two lanes highway by considering the traffic efficiency on both lanes

Abstract Lane change maneuver is one of the critical resources of traffic oscillation which will jeopardize traffic efficiency and safety. Emergent connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technology provides the opportunity to cooperate with CAV movements and conducts cooperative lane change. However, the state of the art indicates that most studies only cooperatively control the host vehicle and the vehicle on the target lane but ignore the traffic flow on the subject lane. Motivated by this research gap, a centralized two-stage optimization-based cooperative lane change (CTO-CLC) approach is introduced for a pure CAV flow in a two lanes highway. The lane change process is studied independently from the aspect of lateral and longitudinal movement. A sine function curve is used for the lateral movement and the cooperative longitudinal movement is divided into two stages according to the physical lane position, i.e. lane change process in original lane (LC-O) and lane change process in target lane (LC-T) stages. The control input and terminal tracking states are considered in the objective function to ensure both the traffic flow smoothness and the tracking performance. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through numerical experiments in MATLAB. The results indicate the cooperative lane change model is available and practical, which can be well carried out in multiple vehicles with a simple real lane change scenario.