Problem formulation improvement for multi-vehicle collision avoidance and impact mitigation

Multi-vehicle longitudinal collision avoidance is a long-standing topic in vehicle control and Active Safety. In our previous work we formulated the multi-vehicle collision avoidance and impact mitigation problem assuming V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle communication) as a finite time horizon Model Predictive Control (MPC) problem. We intended to use the relative kinetic energy between the approaching vehicles as the measure of potential collision impact, which forms a quadratic objective function. However, the constraint representing vehicle approaching was not formulated appropriately, which caused a very stringent constraint to the feasible could set in the optimization at each time step of the sequential quadratic programming resulted from the MPC process. In this paper, we propose two improvements to the problem formulation: one is in the objective function and the other is in constraints. Performance comparisons between those algorithms are conducted to analyze the pros and cons of those two improvements through simulations.