Auction-based crossings management

Autonomous vehicles will ``invade'' our street in a not so far future. They must be coordinated in order to exploit the resources in a fair yet effective way. One of these resources, whose management is quite challenging, is represented by crossings: vehicles come and aim at passing the intersection, often as soon as possible, but they must compete with other vehicles. In this paper we propose an auction-based mechanism to coordinate the vehicles at a crossing, considering the presence of both human-driven and autonomous vehicles; moreover, we introduce an enhancement mechanism to take into consideration also the presence of vehicles in the lanes behind the first one. We analyze different strategies and, by means of simulation experiments, we compare them and show how waiting times change depending on the strategies. The results show that the cooperative strategy presents average waiting times lower for all vehicles than a competitive strategy.