Benefits of Intent Sharing in Cooperative Platooning

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have demonstrated their capacity to address the safety and sustainability challenges inherent in our existing transportation systems. Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is an example of cooperative driving among CAVs, leveraging vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to enhance the car-following capabilities. In general, CACC utilizes preceding vehicle's status data, e.g., most recent position, velocity and acceleration, as a feedforward signal to its controller to maintain a desired car following distance from the preceding vehicle. In this work we extend the car following framework from status-sharing to intent-sharing, where the preceding vehicle's future trajectory is shared in addition to the latest state information. In fact, intent-sharing communication is currently being standardized in the United States (SAE) and Europe (ETSI). Then, we present two receding horizon control frameworks that utilize intent sharing to minimize spacing errors while considering string stability and promoting smooth driving behavior for the ego vehicle. We then quantify the benefits of intent sharing and discuss the improvements of our frameworks over traditional methods. The results are demonstrated through microscopic simulations using real world highway data.