Heuristics Based Cooperative Planning for Highway On-Ramp Merge

On ramp merging scenario is critical to mobility and safety of highway traffic. The existing planning algorithms mainly focus on longitudinal motion coordination for collision avoidance. However, it has been shown that with lateral lane change in main lanes, the road capacity can be greatly enhanced. In this article, we propose an integrated framework for lane change decision making and longitudinal motion planning. Vehicles estimate the time they arrive merge region to guarantee collision avoidance, and optimal control based heuristics are calculated to make lane change decisions. To achieve better performance, we propose a cooperative decision making and planning algorithm. Numerical simulations show the efficiency of the proposed planning algorithm over simple sequential planning policy and scenarios without lane change.