Collaborative Driving System Using Teamwork for Platoon Formations

Abstract

Collaborative driving is a growing domain of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that makes use of communications to autonomously guide cooperative vehicles on an Automated Highway System (AHS). In this paper, we address this issue by using a platoon of cars considered as more or less autonomous software agents. To achieve this, we propose a hierarchical architecture based on three layers (Guidance layer, Management layer and Traffic Control layer), which can be used to develop coordination models for centralized platoons (where a head vehicle-agent coordinates other vehicle-agents by applying its coordination rule) and decentralized platoons (where the platoon is considered as a team of vehicle-agents trying to maintain the platoon). The latter decentralized model mainly considers a software agent teamwork model using architectures like STEAM. These different coordination models will be compared using results on preliminary simulation scenarios, to provide arguments for and against each approach.