Exploiting Traffic Lights to Manage Auction-Based Crossings

Auction-based crossing management approaches are used to design coordination policies for autonomous vehicles and improve smart intersections by providing differentiated latencies. In this paper, we propose and exploit an auction based mechanism for managing the urban traffic light infrastructure in which participant vehicles are either equipped or non-equipped. The difference between these two categories of vehicles is that only the equipped ones can actively participate to auctions through in-vehicle IoT-devices, i.e. they are able to communicate with the surrounding urban infrastructure. In this way, we aim to study the transitional period that will occur before the complete adoption of autonomous or strongly connected vehicles. Through extensive experiments and simulations, by comparing our mechanism to the traditional traffic light fixed-time-control approach, we studied the benefits and limitations, in term of waiting and trip times, when varying the subset of equipped vehicles and the available budget that can be used to participate to auctions.