In recent years, the automotive industry has heavily invested in connected vehicles technologies. Connected vehicles are vehicles that communicate with each other and the roadside infrastructure through advanced communication technologies, i.e., vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I).
The purpose of this research is to address various applications for autonomous, connected vehicles managed by on-board agent-based systems.
An interesting application of autonomous, connected vehicles is driverless convoying whereby a group of autonomous vehicles travel together for mutual support and information sharing. Convoy driving has several benefits: it improves roadway safety, decreases traffic congestion and reduces energy consumption. However, the formation of convoys presents several challenges: coalitions can be formed and dissolved and their structure changed dynamically. In addition, a convoy’s lifespan can range from a few seconds to several hours.
In our research, we consider autonomous connected vehicles managed by on-board agent-based systems driving on a highway. We propose an approach for dynamic Coalition Structure Generation (CSG) that we call connected vehicle Coalition Structure Generation (cvCSG).
In the context of our work, cvCSG aims at partitioning the set of vehicles into disjoint coalitions, each managed by a leader.
cvCSG is based on the following premises:
There is no central processing node for the vehicle system. Leaders are elected and act as centers of control for their respective coalitions only.
There is no central node that has global knowledge about the traffic. Both leaders and member-vehicles acquire relevant information about their surroundings through V2V communication.
Communication is achieved through single-hop or multi-hop routing schemes.
The traffic environment is assumed to be dynamic, i.e., the network topology continuously changes and the effect of these changes is not known in advance.
A vehicle is defined by its ID and a state vector including the vehicle’s position, its orientation, its velocity and its sensor range.
cvCSG is a two-phased approach which aims at finding efficient sub-optimum solutions rapidly.
Two parameters are considered in the definition of the characteristic function: the coalition size and the coalition member’s distances.
Dynamic Coalition Structure Generation for Autonomous Connected Vehicles