With the development of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, it is possible to share information among multiple vehicles. However, the existing research on automated lane changes concentrates only on the single-vehicle lane change with self-detective information. Cooperative lane changes are still a new area with more complicated scenarios and can improve safety and lane-change efficiency. Therefore, a multi-vehicle cooperative automated lane-change maneuver based on V2V communication for scenarios of eight vehicles on three lanes was proposed. In these scenarios, same-direction and intersectant-direction cooperative lane changes were defined. The vehicle that made the cooperative decision obtained the information of surrounding vehicles that were used to cooperatively plan the trajectories, which was called cooperative trajectory planning. The cooperative safety spacing model was proposed to guarantee and improve the safety of all vehicles, and it essentially developed constraints for the trajectory-planning task. Trajectory planning was treated as an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing safety, comfort, and lane-change efficiency under the constraints of vehicle dynamics and the aforementioned safety spacing model. Trajectory tracking based on a model predictive control method was designed to minimize tracking errors and control increments. Finally, to verify the validity of the proposed maneuver, an integrated simulation platform combining MATLAB/Simulink with CarSim was established. Moreover, a hardware-inthe-loop test bench was performed for further verification. The results indicated that the proposed multi-vehicle cooperative automated lane-change maneuver can achieve lane changes of multiple vehicles and increase lane-change efficiency while guaranteeing safety and comfort.

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With an increasing number of vehicles on the road, multiple‐vehicle platoons have become a new solution under communication constraints. However, the existing studies seldom consider the effect of the tail vehicle on the information transfer and platoon control over long distances, and thus the control performance under time‐varying delays is unacceptable. In this study, a hierarchical multi‐platoon control architecture considering the backbone platoon and sub‐platoons is proposed under non‐ideal communication conditions, where the backbone platoon layer communication topology is designed to achieve backbone platoon control and appropriate coordination among sub‐platoons. Distributed model predictive controllers (DMPCs) for backbone‐ and sub‐platoons that integrate delay compensation have been proposed. Buffers and delay compensators in the proposed DMPC are designed to reduce the interference caused by non‐ideal communications. The asymptotic stability is analyzed at the sub‐ and multi‐platoon levels. The results show that compared with traditional DMPC without a compensator, the proposed DMPC can eliminate the velocity lag and steady‐state spacing errors and maintain the maximum velocity and spacing errors within 0.11 m/s and 0.17 m, respectively, under certain operating conditions. Thus, the proposed method guarantees the stability of multiple platoons under both the constant and time‐varying delay conditions.

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