V-STC: A Time-Efficient Multi-Vehicle Coordinated Trajectory Planning Approach

2026-04-23

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of simultaneously ensuring safety and spatiotemporal efficiency in cooperative motion planning for multiple autonomous vehicles. To this end, the authors propose a Variable Spatio-Temporal Corridor (V-STC) approach that jointly models the spatial configuration of spatio-temporal corridors and the time step duration as optimization variables. This formulation enables the generation of dynamically feasible, individual trajectories for each vehicle while guaranteeing collision-free navigation and significantly improving overall traffic throughput. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to existing STC-based methods, the proposed V-STC achieves superior temporal utilization without compromising safety.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Intelligent Robots: Motion and Path Planning
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Novel mobile and WoT systems, and system-of-systems
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Coordinating the motions of multiple autonomous vehicles (AVs) requires planning frameworks that ensure safety while making efficient use of space and time. This paper presents a new approach, termed variable-time-step spatio-temporal corridor (V-STC), that enhances the temporal efficiency of multi-vehicle coordination. An optimization model is formulated to construct a V-STC for each AV, in which both the spatial configuration of the corridor cubes and their time durations are treated as decision variables. By allowing the corridor's spatial position and time step to vary, the constructed V-STC reduces the overall temporal occupancy of each AV while maintaining collision-free separation in the spatio-temporal domain. Based on the generated V-STC, a dynamically feasible trajectory is then planned independently for each AV. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed method achieves safe multi-vehicle coordination and yields more time-efficient motion compared with existing STC approaches.

Problem

• multi-vehicle coordination
• trajectory planning
• temporal efficiency
• collision avoidance
• autonomous vehicles

Innovation

• variable-time-step
• spatio-temporal corridor
• multi-vehicle coordination
• trajectory planning
• temporal efficiency