Intersection Management Protocol for Mixed Autonomous and Human-Operated Vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents a novel embedding protocol that allows for safe and efficient operation of the Hybrid Autonomous Intersection Management (H-AIM) protocol concurrently with actuated and adaptive signal controllers. The proposed protocol extends H-AIM to allow it to cope with some operational uncertainty that is common in actuated signal controllers. A novel approach for computing safety bounds on signal timing is presented as a way of insuring safety in the face of demand uncertainty. Experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of combining H-AIM with actuated controllers for various levels of connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) market penetration and different combinations of common signal control schemes, namely, adaptive signal timing, fixed signal timing, and signal actuation. The benefits are presented in terms of delay improvement when common actuation protocols are used in conjunction with the H-AIM protocol. In contrast to previous reports, the results presented in this paper suggest that mixtures of turning movement assignments that are more permissive for CAVs and less permissive for human operated vehicles are often detrimental in terms of traffic delay. Nonetheless, when implemented on top of an actuated and adaptive controller, the extended H-AIM protocol is shown to never be detrimental while presenting statistically significant reductions in total delay when more than 15% of the traffic is composed of CAVs.