When Automated Vehicles Meet Non-Signalized Intersections: A Collision-Free Scheduling Solution

To develop the future intelligent intersection vehicular traffic management strategies in automated vehicle era, increasing attentions have been paid to the non-signalized intersection scenarios by leveraging the connected vehicle techniques. In the paper, we present an optimal automated vehicle traffic scheduling solution to non-signalized intersection management to maximize the intersection throughput without collision risk. First, we formulate the collision-free vehicular traffic scheduling problem, in which a general vehicular traffic arrival model considering both individual vehicle and platoon cases has been developed. Furthermore, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to calculate the optimal entering time of each automated vehicle and enhance the efficiency of the intersection management to the utmost extent, namely optimal entering time scheduling (OETS) algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed OETS algorithm can significantly reduce the traffic delay and is much efficient than traditional traffic lights.