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This study aims to develop an automatic lane-change mechanism on highways for self-driving articulated trucks to improve traffic safety.

The authors proposed a novel safety lane-change path planning and tracking control method for articulated vehicles. A double-Gaussian distribution was introduced to deduce the lane-change trajectories of tractor and trailer coupling characteristics of intelligent vehicles and roads. With different steering and braking maneuvers, minimum safe distances were modeled and calculated. Considering safety and ergonomics, the authors invested multilevel self-driving modes that serve as the basis of decision-making for vehicle lane-change. Furthermore, a combined controller was designed by feedback linearization and single-point preview optimization to ensure the path tracking and robust stability. Specialized hardware in the loop simulation platform was built to verify the effectiveness of the designed method.

The numerical simulation results demonstrated the path-planning model feasibility and controller-combined decision mechanism effectiveness to self-driving trucks. The proposed trajectory model could provide safety lane-change path planning, and the designed controller could ensure good tracking and robust stability for the closed-loop nonlinear system.

This is a fundamental research of intelligent local path planning and automatic control for articulated vehicles. There are two main contributions: the first is a more quantifiable trajectory model for self-driving articulated vehicles, which provides the opportunity to adapt vehicle and scene changes. The second involves designing a feedback linearization controller, combined with a multi-objective decision-making mode, to improve the comprehensive performance of intelligent vehicles. This study provides a valuable reference to develop advanced driving assistant system and intelligent control systems for self-driving articulated vehicles.

China has a bad reputation — justified or not — for corruption: in a recent Transparency International survey, it was listed by US and European businesspeople as one of the three most corrupt countries in Asia, though its ranking fell slightly in 1996. A national survey revealed that ordinary Chinese regard corruption as the most serious problem after inflation, though 52 per cent expressed doubt that the Government could do anything about it. In 1995, in Beijing alone, 1,085 cases of corruption were uncovered. In 1996, in the Working Report of the Supreme Peoples's Procuratorate, the Chief Procurator Zhang Siqing observed: