Cooperative driving using a hierarchy of mixed-integer programming and tracking control

This paper aims at cooperatively resolving conflicts arising between several fully-autonomous, communicating vehicles in general on-road traffic scenarios. A hierarchical control scheme with two main units is proposed: A short-term planning unit determines obstacle-avoiding reference trajectories in a receding-horizon-fashion, based on solving mixed-integer quadratic programs (MIQP) for simplified vehicle dynamics. A novel cooperative conflict resolution scheme is proposed which orchestrates the plans of neighboring vehicles, trying to minimize a common cost function. Tracking controllers based on model predictive control (MPC) are then employed to track the references using a nonlinear vehicle model. The functionality of the proposed method is demonstrated in a simulation example.