High-speed highway on-ramp merging is a significant challenge toward realizing fully automated driving (level 4). Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), that combine communication and autonomous driving technologies, may improve greatly the safety performances when performing highway on-ramp merging. However, even with the emergence of CAVs, some keys constraints should be considered to achieve a safe on-ramp merging. First, human-driven vehicles will still be present on the road, and it may take decades before all the commercialized vehicles will be fully autonomous and connected. Also, onboard vehicle sensors may provide inaccurate or incomplete data due to sensors limitations and blind spots, especially in such critical situations. To resolve these issues, the present work introduces a novel solution that uses an off-board Road-Side Unit (RSU) to realize fully automated highway on-ramp merging for connected and automated vehicles. Our proposed approach is based on an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to predict drivers’ intentions. This prediction is used as an input state to a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent that outputs the longitudinal acceleration for the merging vehicle. To achieve this, we first propose a data-driven model that can predict the behavior of the human-driven vehicles in the main highway lane, with 99% accuracy. We use the output of this model as input state to train a Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (TD3) agent that learns “safe” and “cooperative” driving policy to perform highway on-ramp merging. We show that our proposed decision-making strategy improves performance compared to the solutions proposed previously.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Novel Decision-Making Strategy for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in Highway On-Ramp Merging


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2022-08-01


    Size :

    2410377 byte




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Reinforcement Learning-Based On-Ramp Merging Decision-Making for Autonomous Vehicles

    Ma, Ning / Zhang, Ying / Cai, Wangze et al. | IEEE | 2023


    Collaborative merging strategy for freeway ramp operations in a connected and autonomous vehicles environment

    Xie, Yuanchang / Zhang, Huixing / Gartner, Nathan H. et al. | Taylor & Francis Verlag | 2017


    Cooperative Merging Strategy for Connected Vehicles at Highway On-Ramps

    Xu, Linghui / Lu, Jia / Ran, Bin et al. | ASCE | 2019



    A Novel On-Ramp Merging Strategy for Connected and Automated Vehicles Based on Game Theory

    Haigen Min / Yukun Fang / Runmin Wang et al. | DOAJ | 2020

    Free access