PI: Zhixia (Richard) Li, University of Louisville.
Project Description:
Connected vehicles (CV) and autonomous vehicles (AV) are emerging technologies that are changing the operations of our transportation system. Research has proven that CV and AV can improve vehicle safety, while using these emerging technologies to enhance the transportation system efficiency and sustainability remains a challenge. Considering that interchanges connecting freeways and local arterials are key bottlenecks in the transportation system, the primary aim of this project is to develop an interchange control system that effectively manages CAVs at interchanges and enhances the interchange efficiency and sustainability. Traditional interchange control using traffic signals permit certain movements to use the interchange by stopping the other movements. This operation can restrain the interchange capacity. By fully harnessing the CAV technologies, the project will develop a reservation-based control system, called Next-generation Interchange Control (NIS), which employs an agent-based centralized control strategy via AV and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication. NIS converts the conflicts between traffic movements into conflicts between individual vehicles, thus is potential to substantially enhance the interchange capacity, and reduces delays, overall emission, and energy consumption. Additionally, optimization to achieve the maximum efficiency and sustainability benefits will be incorporated in the system along with consideration of incident management and accommodation of mixed traffic.