Behavioral Decision-Making Approach for Vehicle Platoon Control: Two Noncooperative Game Models

Game theory has been extensively studied in recent years for its potential benefits on solving interactions between autonomous vehicles in platoon control. In this article, we propose two behavioral decision-making approach based on non-cooperative game theory with both the complete information and incomplete information for cooperative vehicle platoon systems. The non-cooperative game payoff function takes the platooning performances of economy, comfort, safety, and further achieving self-driving functions into consideration. For the driving situations with incomplete information, a belief pool is constructed to represent the action probability for different behavioral types of vehicles, which will be updated by combining the driving intention identification with a Bayesian probability formula. With this, the stable strategies can be obtained for the two potentially conflicting parties, ensuring that neither of them has a motivation to change their driving behavior. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that with the proposed behavioral decision-making approaches with complete information, the cooperative platoon performance can be markedly improved; with incomplete information, the platoon can determine the behavioral types of conflicting vehicles and complete collaborative decision-making approaches for solving not only the simple road-rights conflicting problems, but also for the extended vehicle platoon driving scenarios in a more complex transportation system.