A platoon-based intersection management system for autonomous vehicles

Recent advancements in Intelligent Transportation Systems suggest that the roads will gradually be filled with autonomous vehicles that are able to drive themselves while communicating with each other and the infrastructure. Autonomous intersection management is among the more challenging traffic scenarios, which involves coordinating the movement of autonomous vehicles through a conflict zone. Intersection management is also potentially one of the more beneficial traffic scenarios in terms of mobility and environmental impact. In this paper we propose a platoon-based approach for the cooperative intersection management problem. We assert that leveraging the platooning capability of autonomous vehicles could improve the efficiency of any policy at an intersection, in terms of average delay time per vehicle and can reduce the communication overhead in the vicinity of intersections by a factor of up to the average platoon size. We also develop a new autonomous intersection management method that guarantees the safety of traffic by allowing one platoon in the conflict zone at any time. We examine the effects of platooning on a simple stop sign at a single 4-way intersection in a simulated environment and report the results in terms of average delay per vehicle and communication overhead. Moreover, we evaluate the performance of the proposed method in a simulated environment and compare the results in terms of average wait time per vehicle and variance in delay with that of a stop sign.