Decentralized Optimal Control of Connected and Automated Vehicles at Merge Areas

In the merge areas of highway, vehicles often misjudge the traffic situations of themselves and their adjacent lanes, so it is easy to cause problems such as sudden stops or collisions, which can lead to traffic jams. Advances in Connected and Automated Vehicles allow us to build a computational framework for real-time control and coordination of vehicles. This paper establishes a decentralized optimal control framework to solve the congestion in two adjacent merge areas, so as to reduce the travel time in merge areas and fuel consumption. Firstly, we determine the priority of vehicles on different roads and coordinate the order and time of vehicles passing through the merge areas. Then we get the analytic solution of the optimal control without collision by adding an interior point constraint. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing with baseline scenario.