Service-Oriented Cooperation Models and Mechanisms for Heterogeneous Driverless Vehicles at Continuous Static Critical Sections

As driverless vehicles are increasingly becoming possible, so does the use of such vehicles as intelligent carriers in different domains. Intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) show increasingly heterogeneous, cyber-physical, cooperative, and service-oriented features and are beginning to be merged with the emerging cyber-physical-social systems. Given this new trend, how to make these intelligent vehicles cooperate more safely and efficiently with one another according to novel constraints, such as mission type and quality-of-service (QoS), has become a vital aspect of cooperative ITS (C-ITS). With these emerging characteristics, the classical passing-through-intersection problem has gained new connotations, worth further exploring. After analyzing the essences of this new problem, service-oriented cooperation models and mechanisms for whole autonomous vehicles approaching intersections are investigated in this paper. First, related traffic objects and possible vehicular behaviors are abstracted and modeled with the cyber-physical cooperative features and QoS constraints. A new reservation-based scheduling procedure is then conducted by employing the concepts of vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and typical vehicular passing-through behaviors and several spatial-temporal constraints are designed to coordinate vehicles passing through an intersection divided as a series of continuous static critical sections. Given these considerations, a priority-based centralized scheduling algorithm, named csPriorFIFO, which adopts a novel priority inheritance mechanism to promote the traffic QoS of emergent vehicles, is proposed. Finally, all these designs are implemented in a traffic simulator named QoS-CITS, and the functions and the performance of these studied methods are verified and compared.