Capacity Analysis of Intersections When CAVs Crossing in a Collaborative and Lane-Free Order

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework to compare the capacity of lane-free intersections managed by CAVs with traditional signalised ones, showing significant capacity improvements with lane-free approaches.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework for capacity analysis of lane-free intersections with CAVs, demonstrating potential capacity gains over conventional signalised intersections.

Findings

Lane-free intersections can have up to seven times higher capacity.

Capacity improves with higher initial speed, maximum speed, and acceleration.

Lane-free approach outperforms traditional signalised methods in throughput.

Abstract

Connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) improve the throughput of intersections by crossing in a lane-free order as compared to the signalised crossing of human drivers. However, it is challenging to quantify such an improvement because the available frameworks to analyse the capacity (i.e., the maximum throughput) of the conventional intersections does not apply to the lane-free ones. This paper proposes a novel theoretical framework to numerically simulate and compare the capacity of lane-free and conventional intersections. The results show that the maximum number of vehicles passing through a lane-free intersection is up to seven times more than a signalised intersection managed by the state-of-the-art max-pressure and Webster algorithms. A sensitivity analysis shows that, in contrast to the signalised intersections, the capacity of the lane-free intersections improves by an increase in initial speed, the maximum permissible speed and acceleration of vehicles.