Infrastructure-Guided Vehicle Path Coordination for Lane-Reduced Traffic

The patent introduces an infrastructure entity (roadside unit or central controller) as an intermediary to facilitate path plan negotiation. Instead of direct N: N vehicle-to-vehicle negotiation, the infrastructure receives planned paths from multiple vehicles, determines coordinated paths considering traffic situations and laws, and transmits agreed paths back to vehicles. This mediator approach significantly reduces negotiation time while maintaining collision avoidance capability.

The patent segments the negotiation process into distinct phases: vehicle-to-infrastructure path submission, infrastructure path coordination and determination, and infrastructure-to-vehicle path transmission. This segmentation allows parallel processing of multiple vehicle paths by the infrastructure, reducing overall negotiation time compared to sequential vehicle-to-vehicle negotiation.

The infrastructure entity serves as a centralized coordinator that manages path negotiation complexity. Instead of each vehicle needing to communicate and coordinate with all other N-1 vehicles (creating O(N²) communication complexity), vehicles only need to communicate with the infrastructure (O(N) complexity). The infrastructure handles the complex coordination logic, path conflict detection, and agreement formulation.

Vehicles independently generate their initial planned paths using their own path planning algorithms without requiring complex inter-vehicle coordination. Each vehicle submits its self-generated plan to the infrastructure, which then performs the coordinated adjustment. This self-service approach reduces the computational burden on individual vehicles while maintaining overall system coordination.