A Sequencing Game Approach for Eco-Friendly Platoon Merging in a Connected Environment

Platooning is a main connected and automated vehicle (CAV) application that can significantly enhance traffic efficiency and decrease ecological impacts. In the merging scenario, the advantages of platooning are generally impaired by the lane-changing behaviors of the on-ramp vehicles. This paper proposes a platoon-based cooperative ecological merging control framework, utilizing centralized decision-making and distributed control. More specifically, this framework includes a strategy layer and a control layer. The strategy layer aims to predict the future status of both mainline and on-ramp platoons and develops a sequencing game to determine an optimal merging sequence and speed-adaption time instant to minimize the total carbon emission and delay. The control layer designs a platoon controller based on Distributed Model Predictive Control, which solves the local optimization problem of each vehicle in the platoon. Thus, the framework is not limited to the number of vehicles in the scenario and achieves a system-optimal objective while being optimal for a single vehicle. The proposed control framework is compared against the existing first-in-first-out rule, cooperative three-player game, and search tree. Our numerical experiments demonstrate a better performance of the proposed framework.