Design of a Cooperative Lane Change Protocol for a Connected and Automated Vehicle Based on an Estimation of the Communication Delay

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have recently attracted a great deal of attention. Various studies have been conducted to improve vehicle and traffic safety through vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication. In the field of CAVs, lane change research is considered a very challenging subject. This paper presents a cooperative lane change protocol, considering the impact of V2V communication delay. When creating a path for a lane change in the local path planning module, V2V communication delay occurs. Each vehicle was represented, in our study, by an oriented bounding box (OBB) to determine the risk of collision. We set up a highway driving simulation environment and verified the improved protocol by implementing a longitudinal and lateral controller.