An interaction-fair semi-decentralized trajectory planner for connected and autonomous vehicles

Lately, there has been a lot of interest in game-theoretic approaches to the trajectory planning of autonomous vehicles (AVs). But most methods solve the game independently for each AV while lacking coordination mechanisms, and hence result in redundant computation and fail to converge to the same equilibrium, which presents challenges in computational efficiency and safety. Moreover, most studies rely on the strong assumption of knowing the intentions of all other AVs. This paper designs a novel autonomous vehicle trajectory planning approach to resolve the computational efficiency and safety problems in uncoordinated trajectory planning by exploiting vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology. Firstly, the trajectory planning for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) is formulated as a game with coupled safety constraints. We then define the interaction fairness of the planned trajectories and prove that interaction-fair trajectories correspond to the variational equilibrium (VE) of this game. Subsequently, we propose a semi-decentralized planner for the vehicles to seek VE-based fair trajectories, in which each CAV optimizes its individual trajectory based on neighboring CAVs’ information shared through V2X, and the roadside unit takes the role of updating multipliers for collision avoidance constraints. The approach can significantly improve computational efficiency through parallel computing among CAVs, and enhance the safety of planned trajectories by ensuring equilibrium concordance among CAVs. Finally, we conduct Monte Carlo experiments in multiple situations at an intersection, where the empirical results show the advantages of SVEP, including the fast computation speed, a small communication payload, high scalability, equilibrium concordance, and safety, making it a promising solution for trajectory planning in connected traffic scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to achieve semi-distributed solving of a game with coupled constraints in a CAV trajectory planning problem.