Lane change is one of the most general operations of vehicles. It is necessary to improve the safety and efficiency of lane changes. The existing literature of multi-vehicle lane change problem can hardly balance the lane change efficiency and the disruption to traffic flow. This paper puts forward a cooperative lane change method for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) to improve the lane change efficiency. Firstly, CAVs are regarded as nodes, which are divided into multiple local networks based on the collision possibility. Secondly, CAVs change lanes according to the generated sequence which considers the conflict and potential force between vehicle nodes in the local network. CAVs of each local network can change lanes independently without considering CAVs in other local networks, thus the problem is simplified and divided into separate subproblems. The conflict matrix of CAVs allows multiple lane changes at the same time, which makes full use of the resource of space and time. Relying on this, the advantage of cooperation driving for CAVs is exploited. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated in the comparative simulation experiment.

CICTP