A Real-Time Server Based Approach for Safe and Timely Intersection Crossings

Safe and efficient traffic control remains a challenging task with the continued increase in the number of vehicles, especially in urban areas. This manuscript focuses on traffic control at intersections, since urban roads with closely spaced intersections are often prone to queue spillbacks, which disrupt traffic flows across the entire network and increase congestion. While various intelligent traffic control solutions exist for autonomous systems, they are not applicable to or ineffective against human-operated vehicles or mixed traffic. On the other hand, existing approaches to manage intersections with human-operated vehicles, cannot adequately adjust to dynamic traffic conditions. This manuscript presents a technology-agnostic adaptive real-time server based approach to dynamically determine signal timings at an intersection based on changing traffic conditions and queue lengths (i.e., wait times) to minimize, if not eliminate, spillbacks without unnecessarily increasing delays associated with intersection crossings. We also provide timeliness guarantee bounds by analyzing the travel time delays, hence making our approach more dependable and predictable. The proposed approach was validated in simulations and on a realistic hardware testbed with robots mimicking human driving behaviors. Compared to the pre-timed traffic control and an adaptive scheduling based traffic control, our algorithm is able to avoid spillbacks under highly dynamic traffic conditions and improve the average crossing delay in most cases by 10--50 %.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Oza, Pratham Rajan

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Chantem, Thidapat

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Gerdes, Ryan M.
• Paul, JoAnn M.

• real-time systems
• intelligent transportation. sporadic servers
• intersection management
• ROS

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

vt_gsexam:20557

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/89670