Distributed Ordering and Optimization for Intersection Management with Connected and Automated Vehicles

Intelligent transport systems are preparing to welcome connected and automated vehicles
(CAVs), although it is uncertain which algorithms should be employed for the effective and
efficient management of CAV systems. Even though remarkable improvements in telecom-
munication technologies, such as vehicle-to-everything (V2X), enable communication and
computation sharing among different agents, e.g. vehicles and infrastructures, within exist-
ing approaches, a significant part of the computation burden is still typically assigned to cen-
tral units. Distributed algorithms, on the other hand, could alleviate traffic units from most,
if not all, of the high dimensional calculation duties, while improving security and remaining
effective. In this paper, we propose a formation-control-inspired distributed algorithm to re-
arrange vehicles’ passing time periods through an intersection and a novel formulation of the
underlying trajectory optimization problem so that vehicles need to exchange and process
only a limited amount of information. We include early simulation results to demonstrate
the effectiveness of our approach.