A cooperative mobility model for multiple autonomous vehicles

A mobility model is a basis of constructing the simulation environment for vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) research. Most existing models mainly focus on the geographical movement of individual mobile communication devices. However, few works focus on the cooperative movement of multiple autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we propose a cooperative mobility model for multiple autonomous vehicles, making vehicles run as a swarm in an orderly manner. Specifically, inspired by artificial fish swarm algorithms, we draw on the cooperative behaviors of the fish swarm to model the collaboration and self-organization in multi-vehicle formation. Then we design several force functions to express the interactions between vehicles and the influence of the driving environment based on the artificial potential field. Under Newtonian dynamics, the proposed mobility model determines the coordinated movement of multiple autonomous vehicles by force functions. Furthermore, we introduce a parallel orientation area in the interaction area division to improve vehicle stability. Following existing works, we assume that the road is straight and of infinite length. This is, the considered environment is suitable for intersection-free double-lane roads. To comprehensively verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we conduct extensive simulations under different traffic scenarios. Simulation results confirm that using our mobility model, multiple vehicles are able to keep driving in the center of the lane at the allowed speed limit, form an ordered collision-free motorcade, and collaboratively avoid collisions with obstacles. Particularly, our proposed mobility model has better stability.