Towards Provably Safe Mixed Transportation Systems with Human-driven and Automated Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper develops provably safe motion planning and coordination strategies for mixed traffic systems with human-driven and automated vehicles, including platooning, ensuring safety in single and multi-lane scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of human-driven and automated vehicle models with safety guarantees, incorporating platooning and MPC-based control in mixed traffic.

Findings

Safety is proven for single-lane scenarios.

Safety is demonstrated in multi-lane lane-changing scenarios.

The approach effectively integrates human and automated vehicle behaviors.

Abstract

Currently, we are in an environment where the fraction of automated vehicles is negligibly small. We anticipate that this fraction will increase in coming decades before if ever, we have a fully automated transportation system. Motivated by this we address the problem of provable safety of mixed traffic consisting of both intelligent vehicles (IVs) as well as human-driven vehicles (HVs). An important issue that arises is that such mixed systems may well have lesser throughput than all human traffic systems if the automated vehicles are expected to remain provably safe with respect to human traffic. This necessitates the consideration of strategies such as platooning of automated vehicles in order to increase the throughput. In this paper, we address the design of provably safe systems consisting of a mix of automated and human-driven vehicles including the use of platooning by automated vehicles. We design motion planing policies and coordination rules for participants in this novel mixed system. HVs are considered as nearsighted and modeled with relatively loose constraints, while IVs are considered as capable of following much tighter constraints. HVs are expected to follow reasonable and simple rules. IVs are designed to move under a model predictive control (MPC) based motion plans and coordination protocols. Our contribution of this paper is in showing how to integrate these two types of models safely into a mixed system. System safety is proved in single lane scenarios, as well as in multi-lane situations allowing lane changes.