Polling-systems-based control of high-performance provably-safe autonomous intersections

The rapid development of autonomous vehicles spurred a careful investigation of the potential benefits of all-autonomous transportation networks. Most studies conclude that autonomous systems can enable drastic improvements in performance. A widely studied concept is all-autonomous, collision-free intersections, where vehicles arriving in a traffic intersection with no traffic light adjust their speeds to cross through the intersection as quickly as possible. In this paper, we propose a coordination control algorithm for this problem, assuming stochastic models for the arrival times of the vehicles. The proposed algorithm provides provable guarantees on safety and performance. More precisely, it is shown that no collisions occur surely, and moreover a rigorous upper bound is provided for the expected wait time. The algorithm is also demonstrated in simulations. The proposed algorithms are inspired by polling systems. In fact, the problem studied in this paper leads to a new polling system where customers are subject to differential constraints, which may be interesting in its own right.