Consensus Control of Highway On-Ramp Merging With Communication Delays

In the environment of intelligent and connected vehicles, the information sharing level among vehicles and infrastructure get comprehensively improved. Aiming at the cooperative merging control at highway ramp, we present a two-stage hybrid cooperative control framework considering communication time delays including centralized decision-making for grouping with sequencing and distributed consensus control. The centralized controller is based on a grouping strategy and a cost function for minimizing total travel time and delays and determining the optimal vehicle passage order. Then we model the merging vehicles formation as a multi-agent system, which also could be viewed as a distributed controlling system. Combining with the multi-agent consensus method, it could achieve the desired inter-vehicle distance and speed. The proof tool is the Lyapunov-Krasovskii stability theorem in terms of convergence and formation stability. Finally, we design three simulation scenarios through varying the number of vehicles. Meanwhile, in order to verify the resistance of the algorithm to communication time delays, three conditions with respect to no time delays, heterogeneous time delays, and homogeneous time delays are considered. Simulation result verifies the advantage of the proposed method compared with the Hamilton control method. The efficiency of the proposed method is impervious in three different types of communication time delays and has approximately 30%, 25%, 15% improvement over that of the Hamiltonian method, respectively. Furthermore, the adaptation and effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated under different volumes of traffic flow and communication delays.