Infrastructure-Assisted cooperative driving and intersection management in mixed traffic conditions

Abstract

Infrastructure-assisted cooperative driving, which consists of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) trajectory planning and traffic signal control, can greatly improve the efficiency of signalized intersection operations. In existing studies, the CAV trajectory planning problem is simplified to only modeling longitudinal vehicle behaviors or assuming the lane changing can be executed instantaneously. The generated CAV trajectories are not realistic and can’t be implemented at the vehicle level. Instantaneous lane changing process may also lead to safety issues or uncomfortable driving behavior of following vehicles in a mixed traffic environment. To fill this research gap, we propose an optimization framework that integrates a full CAV trajectory planning model with traffic signal control in a cooperative driving environment with both CAVs and human-driven vehicles (HDVs). A two-level optimization model is formulated based on discrete time. The high-level model optimizes traffic signal parameters, CAV arrival time, and lane assignment at the stop bar, to minimize total vehicle delay. Given arrival time and lane assignment, the low-level model generates trajectories with integrated car-following and lane-changing maneuvers to mimic a human driving policy based on imitation learning. Numerical experiments from a real-world intersection show that the proposed model outperforms adaptive and fixed time signal control by as much as 63.06% in terms of reduction of average vehicle delay, due to better utilization of lane capacity and reduced lost time. In addition to mobility benefits, fuel consumption is also significantly reduced under the proposed infrastructure-assisted cooperative driving framework.