Hierarchical multi-injection strategy and platoon manoeuvres at network junctions

During the recent years, connected automated vehicles (CAV) have shown to be a crucial technology for the upcoming developments towards the improvement of traffic conditions [2, 8, 9]. Considerable efforts have been concentrated in the development of automated strategies for longitudinal formation, a.k.a. cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), where inter-vehicle distance can be shortened, in order to maximize network flow and improve fuel efficiency [1, 10]. Nevertheless, one challenge prevailing in the design of such strategies is their robustness and flexibility to a variety of network configurations and traffic conditions, which implies CAV platoons should allow active platooning manoeuvers such as split, merge, join according to interactions with conventional vehicles in the network. Despite all efforts on the subject, few concrete strategies have been proposed in order to tackle the interactions between vehicle platoons and traffic. Interaction protocols among CAVs for situations of merges and lane reductions were presented in [5]. The strategies herein detail two main scenarios: the first one establishes protocols mimicking human driver interaction within the V2V layer of communication in order to achieve a merge of a single vehicle. The second scenario studies the same type of protocols when lane reduction exists in the network.