Simulation of autonomous intersection management

Michał Tomański

Promotor: dr hab. inż. Jarosław Wąs

Overview

• Why?
• What?
• How?

Current situaton

So, what's the problem?

• The infrastructure is not ready
• Classic intersections won't be effective
• Parking places could be more 'intelligent'
• They need a huge improvement!

Goal

• To create an intersection management system for autonomous vehicles
• Investigate the system under simulation
• Also simulate traditional approaches (traffic lights, roundabout, intersection with priorities)
• Compare the results of simulation and choose a winner

Autonomous Intersection Management

• A vehicle approaching the intersection sends a notice to the managing server
• The notice contains incoming direction and desired direction of the vehicle
• The notice is added to the queue managed by the server
• The manager keeps track of the intersection's area usage in a time slot
• Based on the usage, manager sends back an approval of  crossing or a rejection

Approval

• The manager is responsible for calculating the route of the vehicle
• The route cannot interfere with already allocated routes
• Constant speed and constant angular velocity is assumed
• The car is required to slow down to the given speed

Additional things to consider

• Common notice protocol
• Safety measures - safe distance, speed
• Protocol of retrying in case of network failure
• Behavior of vehicles in case of software failure
• Brief specification of hardware needed for both server and vehicles

Improvements

• Nonlinear speed, nonlinear angular velocity
• Parametrised vehicles
• Priorities - emergency vehicles, buses, bus lanes
• Priority algorithms - first come first served, first route availabe first served
• Time optimisation - one vehicle optimisation, entire crossing throughput optimisation - Altruism!
• Fuel consumption optimisation
• Audit logs - legal concerns

Technical stuff

• Language: scala
• Web framework: Play
• Concurrency mechanism: Akka actors
• Messaging system and persistence: Kafka
• Front-end: ReactJS with typescript (just for simulation)

Thanks