Distributed Ordering and Optimization for Intersection Management with Connected and Automated Vehicles

Intelligent transport systems are preparing to welcome connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), although it is uncertain which algorithms should be employed for the effective and efficient management of CAV systems. Even though remarkable improvements in telecommunication technologies, such as vehicle-to-everything (V2X), enable communication and computation sharing among different agents, e.g. vehicles and infrastructures, within existing approaches, a significant part of the computation burden is still typically assigned to central units. Distributed algorithms, on the other hand, could alleviate traffic units from most, if not all, of the high dimensional calculation duties, while improving security and remaining effective. In this paper, we propose a formation-control-inspired distributed algorithm to rearrange vehicles’ passing time periods through an intersection and a novel formulation of the underlying trajectory optimization problem so that vehicles need to exchange and process only a limited amount of information. We include early simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.