  A distributed coordination method for solving multi-vehicle lane changes for
connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) is presented. Existing approaches to
multi-vehicle lane changes are passive and opportunistic as they are
implemented only when the environment allows it. The novel approach of this
paper relies on the role of a facilitator assigned to a CAV. The facilitator
interacts with and modifies the environment to enable lane changes of other
CAVs. Distributed MPC path planners and a distributed coordination algorithm
are used to control the facilitator and other CAVs in a proactive and
cooperative way. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach
through numerical simulations. In particular, we show enhanced feasibility of a
multi-CAV lane change in comparison to the simultaneous multi-CAV lane change
approach in various traffic conditions generated by using a data-set from
real-traffic scenarios.
