On Optimizing Reservation-Based Intersection Controls

Tile-based reservation intersection control for autonomous vehicles has the potential to reduce intersection delays beyond optimized traffic signals. A major question in implementing reservations is the underdetermined problem of resolving conflicting reservation requests. Previous work studied prioritizing requests by first come first served or holding auctions at intersections, but the possibilities are infinite. Furthermore, although selfish routing behavior could affect the benefits of the reservation prioritization, reservation control has not been studied with user equilibrium routing due to its microsimulation definition. This paper addresses these issues by presenting an integer program formulation of the conflict point simplification of reservations. The feasible region is transformed, resulting in a more tractable integer program on conflict regions for dynamic traffic assignment. Because the integer program is NP-hard we present a polynomial-time heuristic. Finally, we demonstrate the potential utility of this heuristic by demonstrating objective functions that reduce travel time and energy consumption on a city network.