Cooperative Vehicle Trajectory Coordination for Shared Mine Road Conflicts
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing vehicle coordination systems in mine environments fail to effectively optimize the movement of haul trucks to minimize aggregated traversal time, energy consumption, wait times, and queue formation while avoiding collisions and conflicts in shared road networks.
Innovation Solution
A vehicle coordination system that uses Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to determine trajectory control commands for each vehicle, optimizing objectives like aggregated traversal time by modeling vehicle interactions and shared areas, and implementing procedures to reduce computational complexity through binary variable resolution and predetermined travel orders.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If vehicles travel at maximum safe speed to maximize material extraction rates, then productivity increases, but the risk of collisions and conflicts in shared road networks increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary trajectory coordination and conflict detection before vehicles reach shared road areas. The coordination assembly determines safe trajectories and issues control commands in advance, allowing vehicles to adjust speeds and routes proactively rather than reactively, thus maintaining high productivity while preventing collisions.
Solution Approach 2:
The vehicle coordination assembly acts as an intermediary between individual vehicles and the shared road network. It receives trajectory requests from multiple vehicles, coordinates their paths through shared areas, and issues control commands to resolve conflicts, enabling high-speed operation while ensuring safety through centralized mediation.
2Productivity
If centralized coordination of all vehicle trajectories is implemented to minimize aggregated traversal time, then overall efficiency improves, but computational complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The coordination system segments the road network into shared and non-shared areas, and segments vehicle interactions into pairwise conflicts. This allows the computational problem to be divided into smaller, more manageable sub-problems that can be solved more efficiently while still achieving global optimization of aggregated traversal time.
Solution Approach 2:
The system applies coordination only where necessary - specifically in shared road areas where conflicts may occur. In non-shared areas, vehicles operate independently without coordination overhead. This localized application of coordination reduces computational complexity while maintaining overall efficiency.
3Ease of operation
If task assignments are allocated without considering inter-vehicle dependencies, then ease of operation improves, but flow-on effects cause increased wait times and queue formation
Solution Approach 1:
The coordination assembly continuously monitors vehicle positions and trajectories, and provides feedback to adjust task assignments and trajectories in real-time. When conflicts or queue formations are detected, the system modifies trajectories to prevent wait times, creating a closed-loop control system that balances ease of operation with time efficiency.
Data Source
AI summary
A vehicle coordination system is provided for coordinating the trajectories of vehicles on a road network. The vehicle coordination system comprises a plurality of vehicles each having respective vehicle position tracking assemblies that are in communication with respective vehicle communication systems for transmitting vehicle state messages including positions of the vehicles. A task assignment allocator is provided that is arranged to generate task assignments for each of the plurality of vehicles, including destinations in the road network for the vehicles. A vehicle coordination assembly is in communication with the vehicle communication systems via a data network for receiving the vehicle state messages. The vehicle coordination assembly is configured to determine respective paths for each vehicle to arrive at their respective destinations and determine trajectory control commands for each vehicle to traverse their respective paths whilst optimizing a predetermined objective and avoiding active interactions of two or more of the vehicles occurring in any shared areas of the paths. The vehicle coordination assembly is configured to transmit the trajectory control commands to each vehicle. The predetermined objective may be an aggregate traversal time for the vehicles.