Merging control in mixed traffic with safety guarantees: a safe sequencing policy with optimal motion control

Understand

We address the problem of merging traffic from two roadways consisting of both Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and Human Driven Vehicles (HDVs).

• Guaranteeing safe merging in such mixed traffic settings is challenging due to the unpredictability of possibly uncooperative HDVs.
• We develop a hierarchical controller where at each discrete time step first a coordinator determines the best possible Safe Sequence (SS) which can be realized without any knowledge of human driving behavior.
• Then, a lower-level decentralized motion controller for each CAV jointly minimizes travel time and energy over a prediction horizon, subject to hard safety constraints dependent on the given safe sequence.