A cooperative lane change control strategy for cooperative adaptive cruise control platoons with insufficient headway gaps

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) platoons contribute to enhancing road traffic safety and efficiency. However, creating suitable headway gaps for CACC platoons to change lanes is a challenge. This paper proposes a cooperative lane change control strategy for CACC platoons in mixed traffic environments where suitable headway gaps on the target lane are insufficient. Firstly, a cooperative longitudinal and lateral control strategy for CACC platoons is designed. Once longitudinal control ensures that the headway gap on the target lane meets the criteria, the vehicles are controlled to complete the lane change and resume cruising in their original formation. To achieve the longitudinal control objectives of gap generation by cooperative deceleration before lane change and cruising after lane change, a longitudinal cooperative control strategy that can independently create the lane change gap is proposed based on an adaptive weight model predictive control. Finally, the lane change headway gaps in the proposed strategy are generated sequentially for each vehicle, a contrast experiment is designed where the lane change headway gap is generated once and vehicles change lanes simultaneously. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated through numerical simulation combining CarSim and Matlab/Simulink. The results show that the CACC platoon completed the lane change successfully under the control of the proposed strategy. Compared to the contrast simulation, in both low-speed and high-speed highway scenarios, the average speed standard deviation under the proposed strategy is reduced by 48.3 % and 39.9% respectively, while the average comfort index decreases by 11.7% and 5.9%.