Improving the Intersection’s Throughput using V2X Communication and Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

In this paper, a decentralized cooperative adaptive cruise control algorithm for vehicles in the vicinity of intersections (CACC-VI) is proposed. This algorithm is designed to make use of the road capacity to let more vehicles get through the intersection within a limited traffic signal period in consideration of safety, fuel consumption, speed limit and heterogeneous features of vehicles, and passenger comfort. Within a platoon, vehicles try to find the optimal control input by a distributed PSO algorithm in order to reduce tracking errors while respecting different constraints. A concept of opportunity space is proposed to facilitate platoon reorganization in which a sub-platoon or an individual vehicle can choose to accelerate to join in the preceding platoon or to decelerate to depart from the current one. It is found that the throughput of the intersection during the green phase can be improved, and an optimal control input can be found for each vehicle within the defined constraints.