•Propose a multi-stage optimal control problem to minimize vehicle fuel consumption.•Consider the impacts from queue on the optimal vehicle speed trajectory.•Develop a constrained optimization model ...to solve the problem efficiently.
Vehicle speed trajectory significantly impacts fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, especially for trips on signalized arterials. Although a large amount of research has been conducted aiming at providing optimal speed advisory to drivers, impacts from queues at intersections are not considered. Ignoring the constraints induced by queues could result in suboptimal or infeasible solutions. In this study, a multi-stage optimal control formulation is proposed to obtain the optimal vehicle trajectory on signalized arterials, where both vehicle queue and traffic light status are considered. To facilitate the real-time update of the optimal speed trajectory, a constrained optimization model is proposed as an approximation approach, which can be solved much quicker. Numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed optimal control model and the solution efficiency of the proposed approach.
•A volume estimation method is developed using connected vehicle trajectory data.•Formulated as a maximum likelihood problem and solved by expectation maximization.•Two case studies were conducted ...using real-world connected vehicle data.•Estimation results were observed with mean absolute percentage error 9–12%.
Recently connected vehicle (CV) technology has received significant attention thanks to active pilot deployments supported by the US Department of Transportation (USDOT). At signalized intersections, CVs may serve as mobile sensors, providing opportunities of reducing dependencies on conventional vehicle detectors for signal operation. However, most of the existing studies mainly focus on scenarios that penetration rates of CVs reach certain level, e.g., 25%, which may not be feasible in the near future. How to utilize data from a small number of CVs to improve traffic signal operation remains an open question. In this work, we develop an approach to estimate traffic volume, a key input to many signal optimization algorithms, using GPS trajectory data from CV or navigation devices under low market penetration rates. To estimate traffic volumes, we model vehicle arrivals at signalized intersections as a time-dependent Poisson process, which can account for signal coordination. The estimation problem is formulated as a maximum likelihood problem given multiple observed trajectories from CVs approaching to the intersection. An expectation maximization (EM) procedure is derived to solve the estimation problem. Two case studies were conducted to validate our estimation algorithm. One uses the CV data from the Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD) project, in which around 2800 CVs were deployed in the City of Ann Arbor, MI. The other uses vehicle trajectory data from users of a commercial navigation service in China. Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the estimation is found to be 9–12%, based on benchmark data manually collected and data from loop detectors. Considering the existing scale of CV deployments, the proposed approach could be of significant help to traffic management agencies for evaluating and operating traffic signals, paving the way of using CVs for detector-free signal operation in the future.
•This paper presents a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to optimize vehicle trajectories and traffic signals in a unified framework at isolated signalized intersections in a CAV ...environment.•Phase sequences, green start and duration of each phase, and cycle lengths are optimized together with vehicle lane-changing behaviors and vehicle arrival times for delay minimization.•Vehicle trajectories are determined by optimal control models and car-following models on the basis of optimized arrival times with the objective to minimize fuel consumption and emission.•Simulation results validate the advantages of the proposed control method over vehicle actuated control in terms of intersection capacity, vehicle delays, and CO2 emissions.
Existing traffic signal control systems only allocate green time to different phases to avoid conflicting vehicle movements. With advances in connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies, CAV trajectories not only provide more information than existing infrastructure-based detection systems, but also can be controlled to further improve mobility and sustainability. This paper presents a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to optimize vehicle trajectories and traffic signals in a unified framework at isolated signalized intersections in a CAV environment. A new planning horizon strategy is applied to conduct the optimization. All vehicle movements such as left-turning, right-turning and through are considered. Phase sequences, green start and duration of each phase, and cycle lengths are optimized together with vehicle lane-changing behaviors and vehicle arrival times for delay minimization. Vehicles are split into platoons and are guaranteed to pass through the intersection at desired speeds and avoid stops at stop bars. Exact vehicle trajectories are determined based on optimized vehicle arrival times. For the trajectory planning of platoon leading vehicles, an optimal control model is implemented to minimize fuel consumption/emission. For following vehicles in a platoon, Newell's car-following model is applied. Simulation results validate the advantages of the proposed control method over vehicle-actuated control in terms of intersection capacity, vehicle delays, and CO2 emissions. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to show the potential benefits of a short minimum green duration as well as the impacts of no-changing zones on the optimality of the proposed model.
•A joint control framework to optimize traffic signals and CAV trajectory simultaneously is proposed.•A simplified objective function is proposed in the vehicle trajectory control model to obtain ...analytical solutions.•Intersection capacity and green time utilization is improved under the joint control framework.•Benefits are observed under different demand levels in terms of both vehicle delay and CO2 emission reduction.
Current research on traffic control has focused on the optimization of either traffic signals or vehicle trajectories. With the rapid development of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies, vehicles equipped with dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) can communicate not only with other CAVs but also with infrastructure. Joint control of vehicle trajectories and traffic signals becomes feasible and may achieve greater benefits regarding system efficiency and environmental sustainability. Traffic control framework is expected to be extended from one dimension (either spatial or temporal) to two dimensions (spatiotemporal). This paper investigates a joint control framework for isolated intersections. The control framework is modeled as a two-stage optimization problem with signal optimization at the first stage and vehicle trajectory control at the second stage. The signal optimization is modeled as a dynamic programming (DP) problem with the objective to minimize vehicle delay. Optimal control theory is applied to the vehicle trajectory control problem with the objective to minimize fuel consumption and emissions. A simplified objective function is adopted to get analytical solutions to the optimal control problem so that the two-stage model is solved efficiently. Simulation results show that the proposed joint control framework is able to reduce both vehicle delay and emissions under a variety of demand levels compared to fixed-time and adaptive signal control when vehicle trajectories are not optimized. The reduced vehicle delay and CO2 emissions can be as much as 24.0% and 13.8%, respectively for a simple two-phase intersection. Sensitivity analysis suggests that maximum acceleration and deceleration rates have a significant impact on the performance regarding both vehicle delay and emission reduction. Further extension to a full eight-phase intersection shows a similar pattern of delay and emission reduction by the joint control framework.
Driving intelligence tests are critical to the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles. The prevailing approach tests autonomous vehicles in life-like simulations of the naturalistic ...driving environment. However, due to the high dimensionality of the environment and the rareness of safety-critical events, hundreds of millions of miles would be required to demonstrate the safety performance of autonomous vehicles, which is severely inefficient. We discover that sparse but adversarial adjustments to the naturalistic driving environment, resulting in the naturalistic and adversarial driving environment, can significantly reduce the required test miles without loss of evaluation unbiasedness. By training the background vehicles to learn when to execute what adversarial maneuver, the proposed environment becomes an intelligent environment for driving intelligence testing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed environment in a highway-driving simulation. Comparing with the naturalistic driving environment, the proposed environment can accelerate the evaluation process by multiple orders of magnitude.
•This study provides a survey on boundedly rational travel behavior modeling and estimation.•A systematic classification of existing boundedly rational travel behavior models is established.•Existing ...research gaps are presented and promising future research directions are discussed.
Perfect rationality (PR) has been widely used in modeling travel behavior. As opposed to PR, bounded rationality (BR) has recently regained researchers’ attention since it was first introduced into transportation science in the 1980s due to its power in more realistic travel behavior modeling and prediction. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the models of BR route choice behavior, aiming to identify current research gaps and provide directions for future research. Despite a small but growing body of studies on employing bounded rationality principle, BR route choice behavior remains understudied due to the following reasons: (a) The existence of BR thresholds leads to mathematically intractable properties of equilibria; (b) BR parameters are usually latent and difficult to identify and estimate; and (c) BR is associated with human being’s cognitive process and is challenging to model. Accordingly, we will review how existing literature addresses the aforementioned challenges in substantive and procedural bounded rationality models. Substantive bounded rationality models focus on choice outcomes while procedural bounded rationality models focus on the empirical studies of choice processes. Bounded rationality models in each category can be further divided based on whether time dimension is included. Accordingly, static and dynamic traffic assignment are introduced in substantive bounded rationality while two-stage cognitive models and day-to-day learning models in procedural bounded rationality are discussed. The methodologies employed in substantive bounded rationality include game theory and interactive congestion game, while those in procedural bounded rationality mainly adopt random utility and non- or semi-compensatory models. A comparison of all existing methodologies are given and bounded rationality models’ scope and boundaries in terms of predictability, transferability, tractability, and scalability are discussed. Finally existing research gaps are presented and several promising future research directions are given.
One critical bottleneck that impedes the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles is the prohibitively high economic and time costs required to validate their safety in a naturalistic ...driving environment, owing to the rarity of safety-critical events
. Here we report the development of an intelligent testing environment, where artificial-intelligence-based background agents are trained to validate the safety performances of autonomous vehicles in an accelerated mode, without loss of unbiasedness. From naturalistic driving data, the background agents learn what adversarial manoeuvre to execute through a dense deep-reinforcement-learning (D2RL) approach, in which Markov decision processes are edited by removing non-safety-critical states and reconnecting critical ones so that the information in the training data is densified. D2RL enables neural networks to learn from densified information with safety-critical events and achieves tasks that are intractable for traditional deep-reinforcement-learning approaches. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by testing a highly automated vehicle in both highway and urban test tracks with an augmented-reality environment, combining simulated background vehicles with physical road infrastructure and a real autonomous test vehicle. Our results show that the D2RL-trained agents can accelerate the evaluation process by multiple orders of magnitude (10
to 10
times faster). In addition, D2RL will enable accelerated testing and training with other safety-critical autonomous systems.
The curse of rarity—the rarity of safety-critical events in high-dimensional variable spaces—presents significant challenges in ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles using deep learning. Looking ...at it from distinct perspectives, we identify three potential approaches for addressing the issue.The curse of rarity—the rarity of safety-critical events in high-dimensional variable spaces—presents significant challenges in ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles using deep learning. Looking at it from distinct perspectives, the authors identify three potential approaches for addressing the issue.
Cooperation of connected vehicles is a promising approach for autonomous intersection control. This article presents a systematic approach to the cooperation of connected vehicles at unsignalized ...intersections without global coordination. A task-area partition framework is proposed to decompose the mission of cooperative passing into three main tasks, i.e., vehicle state observation, arriving time optimization, and trajectory tracking control. To accomplish these tasks, a distributed observation algorithm is introduced to achieve fixed-time observation of other vehicles' states for passing sequence determination, a distributed optimization algorithm is introduced to schedule conflict-free arriving times for trajectory planning, and a distributed control algorithm is proposed to address parameter mismatches and acceleration saturation for fixed-time trajectory tracking control. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve cooperative passing of vehicles without global coordination at the cost of a growth of 8.8-18.1% average travel times in low and medium traffic volumes.
► This study furthers the understanding of network equilibration process after disruption. ► We propose a prediction–correction model to describe the traffic equilibration process. ► The model is ...calibrated and validated with the data from the collapse of I-35W Bridge.
Although various approaches have been proposed for modeling day-to-day traffic flow evolution, none of them, to the best of our knowledge, have been validated for disrupted networks due to the lack of empirical observations. By carefully studying the driving behavioral changes after the collapse of I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we found that most of the existing day-to-day traffic assignment models would not be suitable for modeling the traffic evolution under network disruption, because they assume that drivers’ travel cost perception depends solely on their experiences from previous days. When a significant network change occurs unexpectedly, travelers’ past experience on a traffic network may not be entirely useful because the unexpected network change could disturb the traffic greatly. To remedy this, in this paper, we propose a prediction–correction model to describe the traffic equilibration process. A “predicted” flow pattern is constructed inside the model to accommodate the imperfect perception of congestion that is gradually corrected by actual travel experiences. We also prove rigorously that, under mild assumptions, the proposed prediction–correction process has the user equilibrium flow as a globally attractive point. The proposed model is calibrated and validated with the field data collected after the collapse of I-35W Bridge. This study bridges the gap between theoretical modeling and practical applications of day-to-day traffic equilibration approaches and furthers the understanding of traffic equilibration process after network disruption.
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