Adaptive control for reliable cooperative intersection crossing of connected autonomous vehicles

Rapid advances in vehicle automation and communication technologies enable connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to cross intersections cooperatively, which could significantly improve traffic throughput and safety at intersections. Virtual platooning, designed upon car‐following behavior, is one of the promising control methods to promote cooperative intersection crossing of CAVs. Nevertheless, demand variation raises safety and stability concerns when CAVs adopt a virtual platooning control approach. Along this line, this study proposes an adaptive vehicle control method to facilitate the formation of a virtual platoon and the cooperative crossing of CAVs, factoring demand variations at an isolated intersection. This study derives the stability conditions of virtual CAV platoons depending on the time‐varying traffic demand. Based on the derived stability conditions, an optimization model is proposed to adaptively control CAVs dynamics by balancing approaching traffic mobility and safety to enhance the reliability of cooperative crossing at intersections. The simulation results show that, compared to the nonadaptive control, our proposed method can increase the intersection throughput by 18.2%. Also, time‐to‐collision results highlight the advantages of the proposed adaptive control in securing traffic safety.