A Virtual Method for Optimizing Deployment of Roadside Monitoring Lidars at As-Built Intersections

Roadside monitoring Lidars (RMLs) will be a crucial part of the future intelligent transportation system. Current approaches for optimizing RMLs’ placement at intersections work in hypothetical environments which do not well reflect real-world situations. This article proposes a new virtual method (VM) for optimizing the deployment of RMLs at as-built intersections. The proposed VM operates in a virtual environment where both static background and dynamic agents are modeled by dense point clouds. The agents are driven by real-world motion data. Using RMLs’ parameters as inputs, a coarse-to-fine subsampling approach is developed to generate laser scans in the virtual world. An objective function is then defined by comparing the agents’ points in the generated laser scan sequences against their original models. Bayesian optimization is applied to maximize the objective function by setting the RMLs’ positions and poses as decision variables. Besides, batch processing strategy and parallel computing are used to accelerate the optimization process. The effectiveness of the proposed VM is demonstrated in a case study. The VM shall help road administrators make decisions on RMLs’ deployment at as-built intersections.