Intersection control system for autonomous vehicles results in up to 95 percent reduction in intersection delay.

Simulation of enhanced next-generation intersection control algorithm shows reduction in delays and improves through capacity

Date Posted

10/30/2015

Madison, Wisconsin, United States

Madison, Wisconsin,

United States

Identifier

2015-B00994

A Next-Generation Intersection Control Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles

Summary Information

A reservation-based autonomous intersection control system, named Autonomous Control of Urban Traffic (ACUTA) manages autonomous vehicles in the vicinity of an intersection to allow them to pass through the intersection without any conflict and few stops. Enhancements consisting of advance stop location (ASL), non-deceleration zone (NDZ) and priority reservation (PR) were introduced and incorporated in ACUTA to improve operational issues identified in previous studies. Simulated results showed that all three operational enhancement strategies were effective in reducing intersection delay.

METHODOLOGY:

ACUTA was modeled as a single-tile and a multi-tile system and simulation experiments were conducted in VISSIM to evaluate operational performance of both. Performance of single and multi-tile ACUTA was compared with operational performance of an optimized signalized intersection, and a four-way stop intersection.

RESULTS:

By enabling ASL, intersection delay was substantially reduced by approximately 95 s/veh (a 95 percent overall reduction).
Using NDZ resulted in a substantial 50 – 55 s/veh reduction in intersection delay (a 90 percent overall reduction).
When PR was enabled, the reduction in delay was around 2 s/veh (a 7 percent overall reduction).
Overall approach capacity was increased by 33 percent, allowing the intersection to process more vehicles per hour per approach without being oversaturated (ACUTA increased left turn, right turn, and through capacities by 37 percent, 32 percent, and 31 percent, respectively.)