With the extension of intelligent vehicles from individual intelligence to group intelligence, intelligent vehicle platoons on intercity highways are important for saving transportation costs, improving transportation efficiency and road utilization, ensuring traffic safety, and utilizing local traffic intelligence [1]. However, there are several problems associated with vehicle platoons including complicated vehicle driving conditions in or between platoon columns, a high degree of mutual influence, dynamic optimization of the platoon, and difficulty in the cooperative control of lane change. Aiming at the dual-column intelligent vehicle platoon control (where “dual-column” refers to the vehicle platoon driving mode formed by multiple vehicles traveling in parallel on two adjacent lanes), a multi-agent model as well as a cooperative control method for lane change based on null space behavior (NSB) for unmanned platoon vehicles are established in this paper. Specifically, a multi-agent model of the dual-column vehicle platoon is first established, which adopted a dual-star communication architecture based on “vehicle-to-vehicle” interactions. Then, rules for changing lanes between platoons are designed, and a method based on the risk perception coefficient for determining the priority of the task is developed. Finally, a cooperative control method of lane change based on NSB is proposed to further resolve the conflict between the lane change task and the collision avoidance task. The cooperative control method based on NSB is validated under the condition of sudden deceleration during the lane change task using a driving simulator. Validation results demonstrate that the method can ensure the safety of the platoon and implement cooperative lane change between the platoon columns stably and efficiently.
