Global Multi-Vehicle Decision Making System for Connected and Automated Vehicles in Dynamic Environment

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have shown the potential to improve safety, increase road throughput, and optimize energy efficiency and emissions in several complicated traffic scenarios. This invention describes a mixed-integer programming (MIP) optimization method for global multi-vehicle decision making and motion planning of CAVs in a highly dynamic environment that consists of multiple human-driven, i.e., conventional or manual, vehicles and multiple conflict zones, such as merging points and intersections. The proposed approach ensures safety, high throughput and energy efficiency by solving a global multi-vehicle constrained optimization problem. The solution provides a feasible and optimal time schedule through road segments and conflict zones for the automated vehicles, by using information from the position, velocity, and destination of the manual vehicles, which cannot be directly controlled. Despite MIP having combinatorial complexity, the proposed formulation remains feasible for real-time implementation in the infrastructure, such as in mobile edge computers (MECs).