Lane-Change Gaming Decision Control Based on Multiple Targets Evaluation for Autonomous Vehicle

Abstract

Automatic lane change is one of the most important highway operations. It seriously affects traffic efficiency and safety. It is also an important driving technology for automatic driving. To achieve the best automatic lane-change control, it is necessary to achieve the control from the perspective of multi-objective evaluation. In this paper, to make it applicable for a hybrid condition of car following and lane change, the traditional car-following model is modified by regarding the longitudinal motion during the lane-changing process as a transition of the car-following behavior in the two lanes before and after a certain lane-change behavior. A hyperbolic tangent transition function is introduced to connect the model to achieve a smooth transition of the model output. Then, the discretionary lane-change decision process of highway autonomous vehicles is modeled into a two-vehicle game model, and a comprehensive loss function concerning safety, efficiency, and ride comfort is proposed for the evaluation of the strategies. The optimal strategy is obtained by minimizing the expectation of losses. Finally, to verify the performance of the proposed new model, simulations of different car-following and lane-changing models are carried out, which is for multi-target simulation conditions. The results of the simulation show that the new model exhibits higher traffic efficiency, better homogeneity, and stability.