Negotiating Highway Interchange Traffic with a Decentralized Instability-Driven CBF-based Algorithm

Abstract: In this paper we consider an interchange lane-swap scenario, a limited stretch of highway with two parallel lanes where most vehicles want to change lanes. We show that a particular decentralized Control Barrier Function based algorithm executes lane swaps efficiently, with minimal speed change, within the specified (short) road segment at high traffic densities (3,500 vehicles per hour per lane). Our main point is that controller tuning, the speed of inter-agent instability, plays a major role in the performance of the vehicle group. This is illustrated by comparing two different tunings of the controller and a third one where the lane swap is enforced by virtual guard rails. Like fighter jet dynamic instability improving maneuverability, the inter-agent instability improves agility of a group of vehicles. We emphasize that the controllers considered are decentralized: agents do not know if others want to change lanes or not.