A Distributed Scheme for Optimal Road Intersection Management

In the very next future, autonomous vehicles will be really present on roads and Cooperative, Connected ans Automated Mobility will be adopted widely. They have many challenges either in urban environments or highway environments. The evolution of connectivity for vehicles ensured thanks to Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) will help autonomous vehicles to be safer and more efficient. Urban scenarios have been studied since many years in particular for the management of road intersections. Some technical solutions are deployed on light management center deployed through Road Side Units (RSU) at each road intersection. These RSU manages the intersection by running a defined policy using a specific algorithm. We propose a distributed scheme to manage a road intersection without any additional equipment. Vehicles run a consensus algorithm which allows to find, at each time, which vehicles have the right to go through the intersection. We have modelled the scheme as a distributed algorithm run by all vehicles around the road intersection.This algorithm has been implemented on a simulator and has been tested on some urban scenarios. Our main findings are that the decision made by the distributed algorithm does not lead to any collision on the intersection and has allowed a better traffic management with the reduction of the average waiting time within the intersection.