Pro-social control of connected automated vehicles in mixed-autonomy multi-lane highway traffic

Abstract

We propose pro-social control strategies for connected automated vehicles (CAVs) to mitigate jamming waves in mixed-autonomy multi-lane traffic, resulting from car-following dynamics of human-driven vehicles (HDVs). Different from existing studies, which focus mostly on ego vehicle objectives to control CAVs in an individualistic manner, we devise a pro-social control algorithm. The latter takes into account the objectives (i.e., driving comfort and traffic efficiency) of both the ego vehicle and surrounding HDVs to improve smoothness of the entire observable traffic. Under a model predictive control (MPC) framework that uses acceleration and lane change sequences of CAVs as optimization variables, the problem of individualistic, altruistic, and pro-social control is formulated as a non-convex mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) and relaxed to a convex quadratic program through converting the piece-wise-linear constraints due to the optimal velocity with relative velocity (OVRV) car-following model into linear constraints by introducing slack variables. Low-fidelity simulations using the OVRV model and high-fidelity simulations using PTV VISSIM simulator show that pro-social and altruistic control can provide significant performance gains over individualistic driving in terms of efficiency and comfort on both single- and multi-lane roads.