Trajectory planning and simultaneous longitudinal and lateral control of vehicle based on the surrounding vehicles decisions during the lane change maneuver

With the increasing number of road accidents and driver assistance systems development, the automated vehicles importance has increased more than ever. As the issue of automated vehicles comes up, attending to their safety, and the impact of the other vehicles in traffic flow on their performance dramatically increased. One of the most important problems for automated vehicles is designing and controlling the trajectory regarding the surrounding vehicles in transient dynamic traffic conditions during complicated maneuvers. Although various studies have been performed in the field of lane change in dynamic traffic conditions and even in critical high speed, considering the transient dynamic conditions has been limited to the beginning of the maneuver and no solution has been provided for the surrounding vehicles’ immediate changes during the maneuver. The algorithm presented in this paper is able to design new safe optimized trajectories according to the sudden decisions of the surrounding vehicles during the lane change maneuver, also ensures collision avoidance in the whole maneuver via vehicle’s simultaneous longitudinal and lateral control. After evaluating the decision-making unit’s performance by real driving tests, the presented algorithm is simulated with different scenarios in complicated transient dynamic traffic conditions by using MATLAB software and its desired performance has been proven in the dynamic environment of IPG CarMaker, in the presence of surrounding vehicles.