How to Measure Cooperation? Cost Functions for Cooperative Maneuver Planning on Highways

Cooperation means working together on a common goal. The goal of road traffic is to transport people and goods to their desired destination in a safe, energy- and time-efficient way. Up to this point, there is no measure for the achievement of these objectives at the level of maneuver planning. Therefore, this contribution presents a method for the evaluation of cooperation in road traffic. It derives cost functions for the subdivisions safety, energy- and time-efficiency from a theoretical basis and adapts them to the requirements of cooperative traffic scenarios. The received cost functions are combined through a weighting procedure to a measure for cooperation in highway traffic. For validation, the overall cost function is applied to three different sequences of the same traffic scenario. The simulation results make the evaluation process transparent and show that the cost function is able to determine the best sequence. Thus, the evaluation method can be applied in cooperative behavior planners to evaluate varying maneuver plans.