California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

The current lane change maneuver for vehicles in a platoon under the California PATH automated highway system (AHS) architecture is inefficient, because the follower has to split from the rest of the platoon before making a lane change. In this report, we propose to add a lane change within platoons maneuver that allows a follower to change lanes and be inserted into another platoon directly without splitting either platoon. This maneuver is performed by aligning and locking the longitudinal positions of the two platoons in adjacent lanes. The estimated improvement in the AHS utilization, in term of the space-time, is approximately 4342 ms. The longitudinal controller for the lane changing follower is designed and proved to maintain the string stability of the platoons. The leader law is modified for the common leader of the two locked platoons. An intra-platoon spacing adjustment procedure is also designed for the purpose of the proposed maneuver.