Pressure-based Policies for Reservation-based Intersection Control

Intersections are a major source of delay in urban networks, and reservation-based intersection control for autonomous vehicles has great potential to improve intersection throughput. However, despite the high flexibility in reservations, existing control policies are fairly limited. To increase reservation throughput, the authors adapt two pressure-based policies for reservations in dynamic traffic assignment. The backpressure policy is throughput optimal in communications networks, but communications networks are significantly different from traffic networks. They propose that congestion propagation can be introduced by modeling each cell in the cell transmission model as a link in a communications network. The finite-buffer limitation on the maximum pressure per cell can be overcome by including queue spillback to previous cells and links. However, a counterexample shows that local pressure-based policies such as backpressure cannot be throughput optimal under user equilibrium route choice. Therefore, the authors also adapt the P0 policy to reservations. Its adaptation is more straightforward, although dynamic traffic assignment also prevents proving that P0 is throughput optimal. Nevertheless, results on the downtown Austin network show that both backpressure and P0 performed significantly better than first-come-first-served, which has been used in most previous work on reservations. Therefore, although backpressure and P0 cannot be proven to be throughput optimal, they provide a better alternative to existing policies.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB45 Standing Committee on Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Levin, Michael W
  • Boyles, Stephen D
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 19p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Autonomous vehicle guidance; Dynamic traffic assignment; Highway traffic control; Intersections; Pressure; Traffic congestion; Traffic signal timing
• Geographic Terms: Austin (Texas)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Policy;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01629957
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-02118
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 27 2017 9:26AM