METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR CONTROLLING A PLURALITY OF VEHICLES, IN PARTICULAR AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

A traffic planning method for controlling a plurality of vehicles (v1, v2, v3, v4) is disclosed, wherein each vehicle occupies one node in a shared set of planning nodes (wp1, wp2, wp3, wp4, wp5, wp6, wp7, wp8) and is movable to other nodes along predefined edges between pairs of the nodes in accordance with a finite set of motion commands. The method comprises: obtaining initial node occupancies of the vehicles; from said finite set of motion commands, determining a mean number of feasible motion commands in a neighborhood of the initial node occupancies; determining a search depth d which makes optimal use of a predefined computational budget; and determining a suitable sequence of motion commands by means of an optimization process which considers the search depth d.