Cost and risk sensitive decision making and control for highway overtaking maneuver

Independently controlled systems may become coupled giving rise to risks; communication, control and optimization tasks have to be solved. Solutions should take into account potential inaccuracies due to disturbances and that information distribution can be inexact, incomplete, or late. In this paper, a highway overtaking scenario with two units is considered. In principle, either of the units can be composed of multiple vehicles. We performed simulations using the validated vehicle simulator CarSim®. The corresponding vehicle models calculated the necessary brake and throttle inputs to match the reference signals. We considered the information observed by the two simulated vehicles together to deduce conditions when overtaking can be successful. Minimization of the cost can be achieved by selecting from the set of feasible solutions. Cost and risk estimations enable one to cast the problem as a Markov Decision Process, which scales well to more complex scenarios.