Preventing Failures of Cooperative Maneuvers Among Connected and Automated Vehicles

Automated vehicles will be able to drive autonomously in various environments. An essential part of that is to predict other vehicles’ intents and to coordinate maneuvers jointly. Such cooperative maneuvers have the ability to make driving safer and traffic more efficient. However, among the various communication protocols proposed for maneuver coordination, no single one satisfies all requirements. This paper assesses failure risks and mitigation strategies for cooperative maneuvers, including an analysis of popular protocols regarding this aspect. We evaluate two cooperation protocols representative for different approaches to cooperation, the complex vehicular interactions protocol as well as trajectory sharing, concerning the performance of mitigation mechanisms and their influence on maneuver success rates or times to reach consensus among maneuver participants. Via simulation, we show that both are suitable for cooperative maneuvers in realistic scenarios and investigate the trade-offs individual mitigation mechanisms face. These results are well-suited as guidelines and benchmark for other researchers developing cooperative maneuver protocols.