Heuristic Priority Scheduling Algorithm at Unsignalized Intersections: An Efficient Method Based on Vehicle Conflict

With the development of autonomous intersection management systems, the intersection control center is gradually replacing traffic lights and becoming the development trend of future intersections. However, most existing studies focus on traffic efficiency and ignore implementation feasibility. To simultaneously optimize traffic efficiency and implementation feasibility, we first design a weighted directed conflict graph (WDCG) to formulate the conflict relationship between vehicles. In the WDCG, we define the weights of the directed edges to classify nodes and quantify the impact of vehicle conflicts on traffic efficiency. Then, a mixed priority cost is proposed to comprehensively evaluate the cost of a vehicle being assigned the highest passing priority. Finally, we introduce a heuristic iterative selection algorithm to schedule the priority sequence under the guidance of three designed heuristic node selection rules. The simulation results show that our algorithm maintains high and stable traffic efficiency in all traffic scenarios with low computational complexity and low communication overhead, proving the high implementation feasibility of our algorithm.