Modeling Reservation-Based Autonomous Intersection Control in VISSIM

The use of autonomous vehicles is attracting more and more attention as a promising approach to improving both highway safety and efficiency. Most previous studies on autonomous intersection management relied heavily on custom-built simulation tools to implement and evaluate their control algorithms, but the use of nonstandard simulation platforms makes the comparison of systems almost impossible. Furthermore, without support from standard simulation platforms, reliable and trustworthy simulation results are hard to obtain. In this context, this paper explores a way to model autonomous intersections through the use of VISSIM, a standard microscopic simulation platform. A reservation-based intersection control system named autonomous control of urban traffic (ACUTA) was introduced and implemented in VISSIM through the use of VISSIM's external driver model. The operational and safety performance characteristics of ACUTA were evaluated with VISSIM's easy-to-use evaluation tools. In comparison with the results obtained with optimized signalized control, significantly reduced delays, along with a higher intersection capacity and lower volume-to-capacity ratios under various traffic demand conditions, resulted from the use of ACUTA. The safety performance of ACUTA was evaluated by use of the surrogate safety measure model, and few conflicts between vehicles within the intersection were detected. Moreover, the key steps and elements for implementation of ACUTA in VISSIM were introduced. These steps and elements can be useful for other researchers and practitioners implementing their autonomous intersection control algorithms in a standard simulation platform. By use of a standard simulation platform, the performance characteristics of autonomous intersection control algorithms can eventually be compared.