Cooperative, Connected and Autonomous Mobility: Coordination at Intersections using Reservation-based Mechanisms

Abstract

Road transportation is fundamental for the movement of individuals and goods, also contributing to economic development. A significant contributor to urban road congestion is poor intersection control using conventional traffic signals. In this work, we present a decentralized multi-agent system mechanism for road intersection management for connected autonomous vehicles, including the coordination of platoon formations. We propose a reservation-based mechanism able to maximize the overall vehicle throughput at intersections. The study introduces i) auctions as an alternative to the First-Come-First-Serve policy for assigning reservations to vehicles and ii) a method for resolving disputes between conflicting reservations. The results demonstrate the benefits of using platooning for improving throughput and the average delay in intersection control. The distributed nature of the approach increases scalability by shifting the majority of the computing burden from the intersection manager to the driving agents.