Priority Maneuver (PriMa) Coordination for Connected and Automated Vehicles

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) are expected to achieve safe and efficient driving by the broadcast of maneuver intentions using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. The cooperative maneuver coordination has a high potential to help CAVs solving challenging traffic situations. We present a novel approach for decentralized and generic maneuver coordination. Relying on an explicit exchange of coordination messages, the proposed Priority Maneuver (PriMa) approach introduces three levels of maneuver requests. The priorities help vehicles that request and accept maneuvers to take decisions by differentiating among desired, necessary and critical maneuvers. Advantages of the prioritization lie in scenarios with many vehicles and with several subsequent maneuvers. Furthermore, the Maneuver Coordination Message (MCM) is extended defining several MCM subtypes. The paper presents the design of PriMa and analyzes three main scenarios by simulations: (i) maneuver coordination between two vehicles with and without prioritization, (ii) coordination with more than two vehicles, and (iii) cascading maneuver. PriMa utilizes different communication patterns for the presented scenarios to enable safe, fast and efficient coordination. The simulation results demonstrate the advantages of PriMa compared to existing coordination approaches in the decision-making process.