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Existing research has revealed that multi‐vehicle coordinated decision making and control can achieve an improvement in both traffic efficiency and driving safety. In the multi‐lane scenarios, a typical coordination method is multi‐vehicle formation control. The existing formation control methods predefine the formation switching process and have not considered or explained the collision‐free behaviour of vehicles in detail. In this paper, a multi‐lane formation control strategy for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) is proposed. The planning framework is bi‐level, which can switch the structure of multi‐vehicle formation in different scenarios smoothly and effectively. In the upper‐level, the relative coordinate system is built to plan the collision‐free relative paths for vehicles. In the lower‐level, multi‐stage trajectory planning and tracking are modelled as an optimal control problem with path constraints. The case study verifies the function of the formation control method in three lane‐number‐changing scenarios. Large‐scale simulations in the lane‐drop bottleneck scenario are conducted under different input traffic volumes, and the numerical results indicate that the proposed formation control method reduces congestion and improves both traffic efficiency and fuel economy at high traffic volumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a unified multi‐vehicle formation control framework for intelligent and connected vehicles (ICVs) that can apply to multiple traffic scenarios is proposed. In the one‐dimensional scenario, different formation geometries are analysed, and the interlaced structure is mathematically modellised to improve driving safety while making full use of the lane capacity. The assignment problem for vehicles, and target positions is solved using Hungarian algorithm to improve the flexibility of the method in multiple scenarios. In the two‐dimensional scenario, an improved virtual platoon method is proposed to transfer the complex two‐dimensional passing problem to the one‐dimensional formation control problem based on the idea of rotation projection. Besides, the vehicle regrouping method is proposed to connect the two scenarios. Simulation results prove that the proposed multi‐vehicle formation control framework can apply to multiple typical scenarios, and have better performance than existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]