Automated Intersection Control

Abstract

Congestion is one of the biggest challenges faced by the transportation community; congestion accounted for an estimated $87.2 billion in losses in 2007 alone. Transportation professionals need to go beyond capacity expansion projects and explore novel strategies to mitigate traffic congestion. Automated intersection management is a novel strategy that has the potential to greatly reduce intersection delay and improve safety. Although the implementation of such a system is contingent on the development of automated vehicles, competitions such as the Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have shown that this technology is feasible and will be available. Therefore, the development of the infrastructure and associated control methods required to exploit fully the benefits of such technology at the system level is critical. This research explores one such innovative strategy, an automated intersection control protocol based on a first-come, first-served (FCFS) reservation system. The FCFS reservation system was shown to reduce intersection delay significantly by exploiting the features of autonomous vehicles. Microscopic simulation experimental results showed that the FCFS reservation system significantly outperformed a traditional traffic signal in reducing delay.

A real-time adaptive signal control in a connected vehicle environment

“…After the federal mandate for installation of the DSCR device in all new light vehicles manufactured in the US, the connected vehicle penetration rate will steadily increase to a near 100% rate in about 25 years (Goodall, 2013). Some innovative ideas (Fajardo et al, 2011;Lee and Park, 2012) have been proposed based on 100% autonomous vehicle penetration. Under this scenario traffic signals at intersections are removed and the intersection is aware of all vehicle trajectories and given full control of each vehicle.…”

Hierarchical-Distributed Optimized Coordination of Intersection Traffic

“…We next describe our solution to the scheduling problem consisting of minimizing C = C L in (4) under the constraints (6)…”

“…Supervisory intersection management (intervention only when required to maintain safety by avoiding collisions) is explored using discrete event abstractions in [2] and reachable set computations in [3], [4]. The works [5], [6] and references therein describe a multiagent simulation approach in which, upon a reservation request from a vehicle, an intersection manager accepts or rejects the reservation based on a simulation. Each vehicle attempts to conform to its assigned reservation and, if this is predicted not to be possible at any time, the reservation is canceled.…”

Sustainability Effects of Next-Generation Intersection Control for Autonomous Vehicles

“…By employing either V2I or V2V communications, previous studies have investigated both centralized and decentralized strategies for managing autonomous vehicles at intersections (Alonso et al 2011;Au et al 2011;Ball, Dulay 2010;Dresner, Stone 2008a, 2008bFajardo et al 2011;Quinlan et al 2010;Shahidi et al 2011;VanMiddlesworth et al 2008;Vasirani, Ossowski 2009;Wu et al 2007Wu et al , 2010Yan et al 2008Yan et al , 2009). Centralized control features an intersection controller that regulates the entire intersection.…”

“…In reservation-based system, intersection is divided into a grid of n-by-n tiles. An intersection central controller, which communicates with all approaching vehicles, decides the passing sequence based on whether certain intersection timespace (in terms of tiles at a certain time) that is needed for a vehicle to traverse through is already reserved by another vehicle (Dresner, Stone 2008a, 2008bFajardo et al 2011;Quinlan et al 2010;Shahidi et al 2011;VanMiddlesworth et al 2008).…”