DASH: A Universal Intersection Traffic Management System for Autonomous Vehicles

Waiting in a long queue at a traffic light has been a common and frustrating experience of the majority of daily commuters, which not only wastes valuable time but also pollutes our environments. With the advances in autonomous vehicles and their collaboration capabilities, the previous jamming intersection has a great potential to be turned into weaving traffic flows that no longer need to stop. Towards this envision, we propose a novel autonomous vehicle traffic coordination system called DASH. Specifically, DASH has a comprehensive model to represent intersections and vehicle status. It can constantly process a large volume of vehicle information of various kinds, resolve scheduling conflicts of all vehicles coming towards the intersection, and generate the optimal travel plan for each individual vehicle in real time to guide vehicles passing intersections in a safe and highly efficient way. Unlike existing works on the autonomous traffic control which are limited to certain types of intersections and lack considerations of practicability, our proposed DASH algorithm is universal for any kind of intersections yields the near-maximum throughput while still ensuring riding comfort that prevents sudden stop and acceleration. We have conducted extensive experiments to evaluate the DASH system in the scenarios of different types of intersections and different traffic flows. Our experimental results demonstrate its practicality, effectiveness, and efficiency.