A Look-ahead Lane Change Scheme for Efficient Driving in Freeway Traffic

Abstract This paper proposes a look-ahead lane change scheme that aims to enhance a vehicle’s driving intelligence for driving on multi-lane roads. Like model-predictive control (MPC) based advanced decision system, the proposed scheme estimates the surrounding vehicles’ future states to determine the necessity and feasibility of a lane change to gain the vehicle’s speed. The decision process is much simpler than the predictive optimization-based schemes and can be easily implemented for real-time driving in complex traffic conditions. The proposed Look-ahead Lane change scheme is compared with both an MPC-based lane-change scheme and a traditional human driving model in typical scenarios in the numerical simulation. The scheme is also evaluated on the part of vehicles in a traffic bottleneck due to a sudden lane-block on the road and found to be effective in alleviating the bottleneck and improving the overall traffic flows.