Optimisation-based coordination of connected, automated vehicles at intersections

Journal article, 2020

In this paper, we analyse the performance of a model predictive controller for coordination of connected, automated vehicles at intersections. The problem has combinatorial complexity, and we propose to solve it approximately by using a two stage procedure where (1) the vehicle crossing order in which the vehicles cross the intersection is found by solving a mixed integer quadratic program and (2) the control commands are subsequently found by solving a nonlinear program. We show that the controller is persistently safe and compare its performance against traffic lights and two simpler optimisation-based coordination schemes. The results show that our approach outperforms the considered alternatives in terms of both energy consumption and travel-time delay, especially for medium to high traffic loads.