Reliable Intersection Control in Non-cooperative Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a strategy-proof intersection control mechanism for autonomous vehicles that ensures reliable and fair traffic management in non-cooperative environments by analyzing strategic behaviors and identifying optimal equilibria.

Contribution

It presents a novel, strategy-proof mechanism for intersection control that accounts for strategic agent behavior and guarantees fair, reliable traffic management.

Findings

Identifies Nash equilibria for strategic agents at intersections.

Develops a socially optimal equilibrium for fair allocation.

Proposes a strategy-proof mechanism preventing strategic misreporting.

Abstract

We propose a reliable intersection control mechanism for strategic autonomous and connected vehicles (agents) in non-cooperative environments. Each agent has access to his/her earliest possible and desired passing times, and reports a passing time to the intersection manager, who allocates the intersection temporally to the agents in a First-Come-First-Serve basis. However, the agents might have conflicting interests and can take actions strategically. To this end, we analyze the strategic behaviors of the agents and formulate Nash equilibria for all possible scenarios. Furthermore, among all Nash equilibria we identify a socially optimal equilibrium that leads to a fair intersection allocation, and correspondingly we describe a strategy-proof intersection mechanism, which achieves reliable intersection control such that the strategic agents do not have any incentive to misreport their passing times strategically.