Formation Control for Multiple Connected and Automated Vehicles on Multi-lane Roads

Coordinated decision making and control can improve traffic efficiency while guaranteeing driving safety. This paper proposes a formation control method for multiple Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) on multi-lane roads. A bi-level planning framework is proposed to smoothly and effectively switch the structure of the formation in different scenarios. The relative coordinate system is established and the conflict-free relative paths are planned in the upper level. Multi-stage trajectory planning and tracking are performed in the lower level. Case study is conducted to verify the function of the proposed method and simulation in the lane-drop bottleneck scenario is carried out under different traffic volume. Numerical results indicate that the proposed method can improve traffic efficiency at high traffic volume.