On the Capacity of Future Lane-Free Urban Infrastructure
This addresses urban traffic congestion and infrastructure efficiency for future autonomous vehicle systems, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing lane-free and intersection management concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of assessing the capacity and spatial efficiency of lane-free autonomous traffic in urban environments, finding that lane-free traffic offers higher capacity than lane-based traffic for the same street width and that a novel approach called OptWULF enables even utilization and handles asymmetric demand without substantial capacity loss.
In this paper, the potential capacity and spatial efficiency of future autonomous lane-free traffic in urban environments are explored using a combination of analytical and simulation-based approaches. For lane-free roadways, a simple analytical approach is employed, which shows not only that lane-free traffic offers a higher capacity than lane-based traffic for the same street width, but also that the relationship between capacity and street width is continuous under lane-free traffic. To test the potential capacity and properties of lane-free signal-free intersections (automated intersection management), two approaches were simulated and compared, including a novel approach which we call OptWULF. This approach uses a multi-agent conflict-based search approach with a low-level planner that uses a combination of optimization and simple window-based reservation. With these simulations, we confirm the continuous relationship between capacity and street width for intersection scenarios. We also show that OptWULF results in an even utilization of the entire drivable area of the street and intersection area. Furthermore, we show that OptWULF is capable of handling asymmetric demand patterns without any substantial loss in capacity compared to symmetric demand patterns.