Cooperative control framework for CAVs at a highway merging area based on MPPI

Highway merging areas are primary sources of traffic bottlenecks due to lateral conflicts of mandatory lane change. Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) technology for cooperative merging make it possible to avoid the conflicts. In this work, we propose a cooperative control framework for CAVs at highway merging area. First, based on first-in-first-out scheduling strategy, the sequence and arrival time to merging area of each CAV are determined, which realize the safe and efficient merging. Second, the model predictive path integral (MPPI) is adopted to calculate the optimal trajectory under influence of disturbance. The simulation experiment validates that the proposed framework outperforms uncontrolled natural merge with respect to efficiency and energy consumption and ensures that the speed and acceleration deviation of CAVs is within a certain range.