Polling-systems-based Autonomous Vehicle Coordination in Traffic Intersections with No Traffic Signals

Abstract

As autonomous vehicle technology advances rapidly, the design and operation of networks composed of fully autonomous vehicles have attracted immense interest. It is widely anticipated that fully autonomous vehicle networks will drastically improve performance. In this paper, we consider a widely studied problem, in which autonomous vehicles arriving at an intersection adjust their speeds to traverse the intersection as rapidly as possible, while avoiding collisions. We propose a coordination control algorithm, assuming stochastic models for the arrival times of the vehicles. The proposed algorithm extends the widely studied polling systems analysis to the case involving customers subject to second-order differential constraints. We provide provable guarantees on 1) safety, no collisions occur surely, and 2) performance, rigorous bounds on the expected delay. We also provide a stability analysis for the resulting queueing system. We demonstrate the algorithm in an extensive simulation study, providing one to two orders of magnitude improvement in delays over the traditional traffic light.