Coordination of Connected and Automated Vehicles at Unsignalized Intersections using Hybrid Quantum Annealing

Intersections are very complicated scenarios in to-day's urban traffic. With the development of V2X and autonomous driving technologies, an unsignalized architecture has shown great potential in guiding the vehicles in a more efficient way at intersections. The conflict-free vehicle scheduling has been pointed out to be the key factor influencing both traffic efficiency and fuel economy. This paper presents a hybrid quantum approach to find the optimal passing order of the incoming vehicles. We first extract a decisive de-conflicting problem from the original scheduling problem based on the graphical conflict analysis. Then a novel hybrid quantum annealing algorithm is proposed to solve this subproblem. Finally we utilize a lower-level controller to apply our approach in a complete conflict-free coordination of vehicles at the intersection and simulations are conducted to assess the actual performance of the proposed approach.