Cooperation of Autonomous Vehicles at Merging Area Based on Multi-agent Consensus Control

In the environment of intelligent and connected vehicles, the communication efficiency and information sharing level among vehicles and infrastructure get comprehensively improved. Aiming at the cooperative merging control at highway ramp, we present a vehicle cooperative control algorithm for distributed consensus considering communication delay among vehicles. First, we propose a group-based strategy and design a cost function to obtain the optimal vehicle passage order containing total travel time and delay. Then we model the merging vehicles formation as a multi-agent system and combine it with the multi-agent consensus theory to achieve the desired vehicle space and speed. Finally, based on the Webots simulation software and numerical analysis, we compare the traditional traffic signal control, Hamilton optimal control and the proposed method in terms of speed, position, arrival time and driving risk. The simulation experiment result shows that the efficiency of merging is increased by 47.3% and 11.7% on average respectively.