  Platooning can serve as an effective management measure for connected and
autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to ensure overall traffic efficiency. Current study
focus on the longitudinal control of CAV platoons, however it still remains a
challenging problem to stay safe under lane-change scenarios where both
longitudinal and lateral control is required. In this paper, a safety-critical
control method is proposed conduct lane-changing maneuvers for platooning CAVs
using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs). The proposed method is composed of two
layers: a higher-level controller for general lane change decision control and
a lower-level controller for safe kinematics control. Different from
traditional kinematics controllers, this lower-level controller conducts not
only longitudinal safety-critical control but also critically ensures safety
for lateral control during the platooning lane change. To effectively design
this lower-level controller, an optimization problem is solved with constraints
defined by both CBFs and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs). A traffic simulator
is used to conduct numerical traffic simulations in four safety-critical
scenarios and showed the effectiveness of the proposed controller.
