Road accidents and traffic congestion are two critical problems for global transport systems. Connected vehicles (CV) and automated vehicles (AV) are among the most heavily researched and promising automotive technologies to reduce road accidents and improve road efficiency. However, both AV and CV technologies have inherent shortcomings, for example, line of sight sensing limitation of AV sensors and the dependency of high penetration rate for CVs. In this paper we present a cooperative connected intelligent vehicles (CAV) framework. It is motivated by the observation that vehicles are increasingly intelligent with various levels of autonomous functionalities. The vehicles intelligence is boosted by more sensing and computing resources. These sensor and computing resources of CAV vehicles and the transport infrastructure could be shared and exploited. With resource sharing and cooperation CAVs can have comprehensive perception of driving environments, and novel cooperative applications can be developed to improve road safety and efficiency (RSE). The key feature of the cooperative CAV system is the cooperation within and across the key players in the road transport systems and across system layers. For example, the various levels of cooperation include cooperative sensing, cooperative RSE applications and cooperation among the vehicles and among the vehicles and infrastructure. We will present the potentials that could be brought by cooperative CAV, the roadmap for research and development, the preliminary research results and open issues.

In this paper, on-road trajectory planning is solved by introducing intelligent computing budget allocation (ICBA) into a candidate-curve-based planning algorithm, namely, ordinal-optimization-based differential evolution (OODE). The proposed algorithm is named IOODE with ‘I’ representing ICBA. OODE plans the trajectory in two parts: trajectory curve and acceleration profile. The best trajectory curve is picked from a set of candidate curves, where each curve is evaluated by solving a subproblem with the differential evolution (DE) algorithm. The more iterations DE performs, the more accurate the evaluation will become. Thus, we intelligently allocate the iterations to individual curves so as to reduce the total number of iterations performed. Meanwhile, the selected best curve is ensured to be one of the truly top curves with a high enough probability. Simulation results show that IOODE is 20% faster than OODE while maintaining the same performance in terms of solution quality. The computing budget allocation framework presented in this paper can also be used to enhance the efficiency of other candidate-curve-based planning methods.