Connected Vehicles

Overview 1
Driverless Convoying 2
Demos 3

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