Optimizing the trade-off between fuel consumption and travel time in an unsignalized autonomous intersection crossing

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to disrupt road transportation. CAVs provide several attractive features, such as seamless connectivity and fine-grained control, which can be exploited to improve the efficiency of traffic networks. In this work, the problem of CAV coordination at an unsignalized intersection crossing is considered, aiming to select the CAV trajectories that minimize fuel consumption and/or travel time. Nonetheless, the minimization of travel time implies high fuel consumption and vice-versa. For this reason, this work considers the problem of simultaneously optimizing the fuel consumption-travel time trade-off for a set of CAVs that are expected to arrive at the intersection within a specific time-window. As the resulting problem is non-convex, we construct a Mixed-Integer Programming formulation that provides tight lower and upper bounds. We also develop a heuristic convex-concave procedure that yields fast, high-quality solutions. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and highlight the importance of optimizing the fuel consumption-travel time trade-off, as small compromises in travel time produce significant fuel savings.This work has also been supported by the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development and the Research Promotion Foundation (Project: CULTURE/BR-NE/0517/14). © 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. A. Hadjigeorgiou and S. Timotheou, "Optimizing the trade-off between fuel consumption and travel time in an unsignalized autonomous intersection crossing," 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), Auckland, New Zealand, 2019, pp. 2443-2448, doi: 10.1109/ITSC.2019.8917530