Priority-Based Cooperative Driving Planner for V2X Maneuver Coordination Application

Cooperative driving has the potential to increase the safety, comfort, and efficiency of traffic. This can become a reality for the connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) through the use of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication to perform mutually agreed cooperative maneuvers. To achieve this, the developments of a maneuver coordination service (MCS) and message (MCM) are progressing in both, the research community, and in the standardization process. A research gap is identified during the initiation and negotiation phase of the maneuvers and the associated cooperation costs for the cooperating CAVs. In this paper, a new cooperative driving planner is proposed that is based on priority maneuvers. To determine the related cooperation costs and acceptable thresholds for different priorities, five different metrics are used based on the safety, comfort, and time efficiency. The goal is to create a planner that can be modified with different metrics and adapted for the various proposed decentralized maneuver coordination approaches in the literature. To validate the planner, a merging use case has been selected, which is typical for conflicts or traffic congestion where cooperative driving can bring significant benefits. A variation of scenarios with different traffic flows and densities are generated in a V2X simulation environment to evaluate the planner based on several metrics. The proposed cooperative maneuver planner aims to plan safe, comfortable, and efficient maneuvers for CAVs.