A Comparative Study of Longitudinal Vehicle Control Systems in Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Connected Corridor 12-06-04-0025

Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) connectivity technology presents the opportunity for vehicles to perform autonomous longitudinal control to navigate safely and efficiently through sequences of V2I-enabled intersections, known as connected corridors. Existing research has proposed several control systems to navigate these corridors while minimizing energy consumption and travel time. This article analyzes and compares the simulated performance of three different autonomous navigation systems in connected corridors: a V2I-informed constant acceleration kinematic controller (V2I-K), a V2I-informed model predictive controller (V2I-MPC), and a V2I-informed reinforcement learning (V2I-RL) agent. A rules-based controller that does not use V2I information is implemented to simulate a human driver and is used as a baseline. The performance metrics analyzed are net energy consumption, travel time, and root-mean-square (RMS) acceleration. Two connected corridor scenarios are created to evaluate these metrics, including one scenario reconstructed from real-world traffic signal data. A sensitivity analysis is also performed to quantitatively identify key parameters that have the highest impact on the three metrics of interest.