A nearly throughput-maximum knotted intersection design and control for connected and automated vehicles

Traffic at urban intersections constitute a series of complex conflicting vehicular movements and contribute greatly to the problems of traffic congestion and air pollution. The emerging of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies inspires innovative ideas in traffic management at intersections; it not only enables new control paradigms, but also allows for possibilities to revolutionize the geometric layouts of intersections. This study proposes a novel intersection design called knotted intersection (KI), to resolve the complexity of conflicting relations at intersections in a full CAV environment. This new design is associated with a set of neat control rules for vehicles to realize the smooth traffic operation at these intersections. The design problem of intersection geometry and control strategy is optimized jointly and formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP), and some basic theoretical properties of KI design are derived, including nearly throughput-maximizing property and bounded within-intersection delay of vehicles. Furthermore, the KI design is then extended to a road network composed of multiple intersections to improve the overall efficiency. The optimal design of multiple knotted intersections (MKI) is developed to coordinate the traffic organization methods among intersections and a two-level solution method is proposed to solve the optimization efficiently. Numerical and simulation experiments are conducted at both the intersection level and network level under various cases, and the results validate the superior performance of the proposed methods compared to classical traffic signal control (TSC) strategies.