Negotiation in Cooperative Maneuvering using Conflict Analysis: Theory and Experimental Evaluation

Negotiation is a class of cooperation enabled by vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, which involves the exchange of maneuver requests and responses between road users. In this paper, we develop criteria for request initiation and response generation under a unified conflict analysis framework. This leads to guaranteed maneuver feasibility in request and response that satisfy user-based behavior preferences. We implement negotiation via commercially available V2X devices, and experimentally evaluate the benefits of negotiation in conflict resolution. We demonstrate that negotiation can significantly benefit time efficiency of maneuvers while ensuring safety, compared to lower levels of cooperation such as status-sharing and intent-sharing. These benefits and their degradation under communication delays are quantified.