Handling Driver Cut-Ins for Vehicle Platoons with a Game Theoretic Approach

Vehicle platoons (VPs) are formations of vehicles traveling closely together at synchronized speeds. For a long period, human-driven vehicles (HDVs) and VPs will coexist in heterogeneous driving scenarios, where the cut-in operation of the HDVs can frequently occur. In this paper, to address such cut-ins, we propose a game theory-based decision-making strategy for the VPs by explicitly considering their interaction with the cut-in vehicles (CIVs). The proposed method is developed by integrating the costs related to driving efficiency, ride comfort, and road safety, with adjustable coefficients representing various driving styles. Nash equilibrium with conditional pruning is employed in the decision-making. Simulation tests were conducted under a fixed testing scenario and a random testing scenario. We show the results under the fixed testing scenario by detailing the control process of the proposed algorithm with three different driving styles, i.e., conservative, normal, and aggressive. Besides, we analyze the effects of the efficiency, comfort, and safety coefficients on the performance of the proposed algorithm in the random testing scenario.