Collaborative Research: Smart Vehicle Platooning Built upon Real-Time Learning and Distributed Optimization

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Emerging connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technologies offer great potentials to reduce traffic congestion and improve traffic efficiency. However, much of the CAV related work focuses on individual vehicles' safety, which compromises traffic efficiency when mixed traffic (CAVs and human-driven vehicles) are on the road interacting with each other. This project aims to study how a group of CAVs can respond to exogenous disturbances resulting from human-driven vehicles, lane change requests and abnormal traffic and cyber conditions through cooperative speed or acceleration control. The research will improve road safety and traffic efficiency of future transportation systems involving CAVs. This project will disseminate research and education outcomes to broader audiences, including under-represented college and K-12 students with a particular focus on minority students. The specific research objectives of this project are to develop vehicle platoon centered optimal, adaptive, and resilient vehicle platooning control under various normal or abnormal traffic and/or cyber conditions. The project will develop (a) advanced model predictive control integrating distributed optimization for optimal vehicle platooning control under normal traffic/cyber conditions; (b) mixed integer programming based model predictive control for optimal vehicle platooning control adaptive to lane change requests; (c) resilient vehicle platooning control integrating real-time learning and distributed optimization under abnormal traffic and/or cyber conditions. The project will integrate the state of the art from multiple fields including traffic flows, control, optimization, learning, and distributed computation and will establish an interdisciplinary foundation for coordinated and automated vehicle platoon centered traffic control under complex real-world traffic conditions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.