Fault-Tolerant Cooperative Driving at Signal-Free Intersections

Abstract

Cooperative driving shows great potential to improve traffic safety and efficiency and has been well discussed in recent years. However, most existing studies focus on ideal traffic environments and ignore potential vehicle failures in traffic systems, which pose significant threats to traffic safety. Therefore, the fault-tolerant capacity of the existing cooperative driving strategies is questionable. To fill this research gap, this paper proposes a fault-tolerant cooperative driving strategy for signal-free intersections by modeling potential vehicle failure types, aiming to keep a good balance between traffic safety and efficiency. Notably, a rule-based fault-tolerant model is constructed to mitigate the threat of potential vehicle failures to traffic safety and efficiency, and to effectively recover the cooperative driving system after vehicle failures occur. Theoretical analysis and simulation results jointly demonstrate the promising performance of the proposed model in achieving fault tolerance and improving traffic efficiency.