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

Abstract

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.