I. A. Ntousakis, I. K. Nikolos, M. Papageorgiou, "Cooperative vehicle merging on highways – model predictive control," in 96th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB), 2017.
The problem of trajectory planning for the cooperative merging of vehicles in highways was previously formulated by the authors as a finite horizon optimal control problem and was solved analytically. In this work, the trajectory planning approach is further extended in various respects, and an alternative solution procedure via a time variant Linear Quadratic Regulator approach is also presented. Most importantly, a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme is utilized to compensate possible disturbances in the trajectories of the cooperating vehicles, whereby the analytical optimal solution is applied repeatedly in real time, using updated measurements, until the merging procedure is actually finalized. The methodology is demonstrated for a set of vehicles inside the merging area. Various numerical simulations illustrate the validity and applicability of the method.