Title: Towards Provably Safe Mixed Transportation Systems with Human-driven and Automated Vehicles,
Abstract: Currently, we are in an environment where the fraction of automated vehicles
is negligibly small. We anticipate that this fraction will increase in coming
decades before if ever, we have a fully automated transportation system.
Motivated by this we address the problem of provable safety of mixed traffic
consisting of both intelligent vehicles (IVs) as well as human-driven vehicles
(HVs). An important issue that arises is that such mixed systems may well have
lesser throughput than all human traffic systems if the automated vehicles are
expected to remain provably safe with respect to human traffic. This
necessitates the consideration of strategies such as platooning of automated
vehicles in order to increase the throughput. In this paper, we address the
design of provably safe systems consisting of a mix of automated and
human-driven vehicles including the use of platooning by automated vehicles.
We design motion planing policies and coordination rules for participants in
this novel mixed system. HVs are considered as nearsighted and modeled with
relatively loose constraints, while IVs are considered as capable of following
much tighter constraints. HVs are expected to follow reasonable and simple
rules. IVs are designed to move under a model predictive control (MPC) based
motion plans and coordination protocols. Our contribution of this paper is in
showing how to integrate these two types of models safely into a mixed system.
System safety is proved in single lane scenarios, as well as in multi-lane
situations allowing lane changes.