Managing autonomous vehicles at intersections

Abstract

In the past, more and broader roads have been built to manage the growing traffic. However, these approaches will be insufficient for future traffic management, because of environmental concerns and a lack of space, especially in urban areas. The significant and rapidly increasing improvements in communication and information technology as well as the decreasing prices, are motivating a new look at the handling of the growing road traffic problem. The idea is to put more intelligence into the vehicles to benefit from decentralized solutions. However, the problem's complexity rises with the number of participating vehicles. One promising solution is for each vehicle to put its own computing power into the system, thus helping to meet the growing demand for computing power. As an example, we discuss an intersection management strategy for autonomous vehicles.