Development and Evaluation of a Surrounding Vehicle Identification System for Mixed Traffic Cooperative Platooning

To facilitate cooperation among connected automated vehicles (CAVs), such as cooperative platooning or cooperative lane changes in mixed traffic comprising CAVs, connected human-driven vehicles (CHVs), and conventional (unconnected) human-driven vehicles (HDVs), an ego CAV needs to discern which surrounding vehicles are connected (CAVs or CHVs) and which are unconnected (HDVs). Therefore, this paper introduces a surrounding vehicles identification system (SVIS) designed to enable CAVs to identify the connectivity status of surrounding vehicles. Unlike a previously developed preceding vehicle identification system that only identifies the connectivity of its immediately preceding vehicle, the proposed SVIS generalizes this identification to nearby surrounding vehicles. Furthermore, the proposed SVIS significantly reduces the error in the connected vehicle identification by integrating distance and the magnitude of velocity for matching instead of distance-only matching used by the previous system. The SVIS is a must to enable CAVs to form platoons via lane changes after a connected vehicle is detected in an adjacent lane. We compared a newly proposed distance-plus-speed-matching approach with a previously developed distance-only-matching approach using Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) data. Through comparison, the efficacy of the proposed distance-plus-speed-matching SVIS is demonstrated to be considerably superior to that of the distance-only-matching SVIS. Given that a reliable and robust method for identifying surrounding connected vehicles is key to the successful formation of cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) platoons and cooperative lane changes, the proposed distance-plus-speed-matching SVIS would help quickly and efficiently form platoons in a mixed traffic environment.