Cut through traffic like a snake: cooperative adaptive cruise control with successive platoon lane-change capability

A cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) system may be impeded by slow-moving traffic in the application. To improve the mobility of CACC, this research proposes a CACC controller with successive platoon lane-change capability. The goal is to help a platoon cut through traffic successively like a snake via smaller windows. The proposed controller has the following features: i) with successive platoon lane-change capability; ii) with string stability and lateral stability; iii) with consideration of vehicle dynamics. The proposed controller is evaluated on a simulation platform with the context of traffic and a joint simulation platform consisting of PreScan and Matlab/Simulink. the Results demonstrate that compared to the conventional controller: i) platoon lane-change competence is enhanced by 71.36% on arterials and 120.49% on freeways; ii) platoon lane-change efficiency is enhanced by 25.05% on arterials and 41.36% on freeways; iii) the proposed controller is more robust against congestion. Moreover, the computation time of the proposed controller is approximately 15 milliseconds when running on a laptop equipped with an Intel i7-8750H CPU. This indicates that the proposed controller is ready for real-time implementation.