An effective traffic control strategy will improve travel reliability in urban transportation networks. Lack of coordination between vehicles, however, exacerbates congestion due mainly to frequent stops at unsignalized intersections. It is beneficial to develop a conflict-free cooperation method that collects basic safety message from multiple approaching connected and autonomous vehicles and guarantees efficient unsignalized intersection operations with safe and incident free vehicle maneuvers. In this paper, in order to maximize the intersection throughput, we propose a a distributed conflict-free cooperation control logic for multiple connected vehicles at unsignalized intersections. Firstly, a virtual platoon, which project the approaching vehicles from different traffic movements into a virtual lane and introduce a conflict-free geometry topology, is constructed to determine the near-optimal actions (i.e., acceleration rates) over time to prevent movement conflicts. Then we present the modeling of shared trajectory to calculate the right-of-way between all entrance lanes. Finally, a distributed controller is designed to stabilize the virtual platoon for conflict-free cooperation at unsignalized intersections. Numerical results confirm that the proposed control logic can significantly reduces travel time while completely avoids incidents at unsignalized intersections at intersections under various demand patterns.

CICTP