A Hierarchical Robust Control Strategy for Decentralized Signal-Free Intersection Management

The development of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) is the key to improving urban mobility safety and efficiency. This article focuses on cooperative vehicle management at a signal-free intersection with consideration of vehicle modeling uncertainties and sensor measurement disturbances. The problem is approached by a hierarchical robust control strategy in a decentralized traffic coordination framework where optimal control and tube-based robust model predictive control methods are designed to hierarchically solve the optimal crossing order and the velocity trajectories of a group of CAVs in terms of energy consumption and throughput. To capture the energy consumption of each vehicle, their powertrain system is modeled in line with an electric drive system. With a suitable relaxation and spatial modeling approach, the optimization problems in the proposed strategy can be formulated as convex second-order cone programs, which provide a unique and computationally efficient solution. A rigorous proof of the equivalence between the convexified and the original problems is also provided. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed strategy and reveal the impact of traffic density on the control solution. The study of the Pareto optimal solutions for the energy–time objective shows that a minor reduction in journey time can considerably reduce energy consumption, which emphasizes the necessity of optimizing their tradeoff. Finally, the numerical comparisons carried out for different prediction horizons and sampling intervals provide insight into the control design.