Simulation-Based Evaluation of Cooperative Maneuver Coordination and Its Impact on Traffic Quality

Cooperative Maneuver Coordination (CMC) is one of the cornerstone technologies on the way to automated and connected driving of the future. The goal of this technology is to increase traffic safety and efficiency, by solving potential conflict situations on the road, based on cooperative maneuver planning, negotiation and decision-making, with the aid of inter-vehicular communication. This innovative topic represents a wide area for research projects, e.g., such as German funded project IMAGinE. A variety of different approaches for CMC has already been implemented and evaluated in the related work of the recent past. However, due to the high system complexity in general and vast testing effort in particular of these solutions, their actual impact on the traffic quality has not yet been extensively addressed, and therefore must be further investigated. In order to fulfill this task, one needs a methodology with appropriate evaluation metrics alongside with a suitable testing environment, in order to obtain comprehensive results. The scientific contribution of the work at hand involves a simulation-based evaluation methodology for CMC. For this, we will propose a novel CMC algorithm, which is built upon a direct trajectory exchange via inter-vehicular communication and a decentralized decision-making process, suitable for both manually operated as well as autonomous vehicles. In order to examine this algorithm, we will introduce a co-simulation environment with automatic scenario generation and multi-instances capability, which consists of a coupled simulation of traffic flow and vehicle dynamics. Eventually, we will present a set of metrics, which we determined in order to evaluate effectiveness and efficiency of our CMC algorithm, considering its impact on various aspects of the traffic quality.