Optimal Control of Connected and Automated Vehicles at Multiple Adjacent Intersections

In this article, we establish a decentralized optimal control framework for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) crossing multiple adjacent, multilane signal-free intersections to minimize energy consumption and improve traffic throughput. Our framework consists of two layers of planning. In the upper level planning, each CAV computes its optimal arrival time at each intersection recursively along with the optimal lane to improve the traffic throughput. In the low-level planning, we formulate an energy-optimal control problem with interior-point constraints, the solution of which yields the optimal control input (acceleration/deceleration) of each CAV to cross the intersections at the time specified by the upper level planning. Moreover, we extend the results of the proposed bi-level framework to include a bounded steady-state error in tracking the optimal position of the CAVs. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework through simulation for symmetric and asymmetric intersections and comparison with traditional signalized intersections.