PAIM: Platoon-based Autonomous Intersection Management

With the emergence of autonomous ground vehicles and the recent advancements in Intelligent Transportation Systems, Autonomous Traffic Management has garnered more and more attention. Autonomous Intersection Management (AIM), also known as Cooperative Intersection Management (CIM) is among the more challenging traffic problems that poses important questions related to safety and optimization in terms of delays, fuel consumption, emissions and reliability. Previously we introduced two stop-sign based policies for autonomous intersection management that were compatible with platoons of autonomous vehicles. These policies outperformed regular stop-sign policy both in terms of average delay per vehicle and variance in delay. This paper introduces a reservation-based policy that utilizes the cost functions from our previous work to derive optimal schedules for platoons of vehicles. The proposed policy guarantees safety by not allowing vehicles with conflicting turning movement to be in the conflict zone at the same time. Moreover, a greedy algorithm is designed to search through all possible schedules to pick the best that minimizes a cost function based on a trade-off between total delay and variance in delay. A simulator software is designed to compare the results of the proposed policy in terms of average delay per vehicle and variance in delay with that of a 4-phase traffic light.