期刊名称：Journal of Automation, Mobile Robotics & Intelligent Systems (JAMRIS)
印刷版ISSN：1897-8649
电子版ISSN：2080-2145
出版年度：2008
卷号：31
页码：591-656
出版社：Industrial Research Inst. for Automation and Measurements, Warsaw
摘要：Artificial intelligence research is ushering in a new era of sophisticated,
mass-market transportation technology. While computers can already fly a
passenger jet better than a trained human pilot, people are still faced with the
dangerous yet tedious task of driving automobiles. Intelligent Transportation
Systems (ITS) is the field that focuses on integrating information technology
with vehicles and transportation infrastructure to make transportation safer,
cheaper, and more efficient. Recent advances in ITS point to a future in which
vehicles themselves handle the vast majority of the driving task. Once
autonomous vehicles become popular, autonomous interactions amongst multiple
vehicles will be possible. Current methods of vehicle coordination, which are
all designed to work with human drivers, will be outdated. The bottleneck for
roadway efficiency will no longer be the drivers, but rather the mechanism by
which those drivers' actions are coordinated. While open-road driving is a
well-studied and more-or-less-solved problem, urban traffic scenarios,
especially intersections, are much more challenging.
We believe current
methods for controlling traffic, specifically at intersections, will not be able
to take advantage of the increased sensitivity and precision of autonomous
vehicles as compared to human drivers. In this article, we suggest an
alternative mechanism for coordinating the movement of autonomous vehicles
through intersections. Drivers and intersections in this mechanism are treated
as autonomous agents in a multiagent system. In this multiagent system,
intersections use a new reservation-based approach built around a detailed
communication protocol, which we also present. We demonstrate in simulation that
our new mechanism has the potential to significantly outperform current
intersection control technology -- traffic lights and stop signs. Because our
mechanism can emulate a traffic light or stop sign, it subsumes the most popular
current methods of intersection control. This article also presents two
extensions to the mechanism. The first extension allows the system to control
human-driven vehicles in addition to autonomous vehicles. The second gives
priority to emergency vehicles without significant cost to civilian vehicles.
The mechanism, including both extensions, is implemented and tested in
simulation, and we present experimental results that strongly attest to the
efficacy of this approach
