Comparing the Ecological Footprint of Intersection Management Protocols for Human/Autonomous Scenarios

The design of Intelligent Intersection Management (IIM) schemes for fully Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and mixed with Human-driven Vehicles (HVs) has focused mainly on throughput maximization and users' safety. However, new IIM strategies should consider environmental factors and human health conditions in their design, given their impact on fuel wastage and emission of dangerous air pollutants. In this paper, we compare the ecological footprint of two IMM protocols that follow opposite paradigms in handling AVs and HVs with an internal combustion engine. We consider Round-Robin (RR) that favors the crossing of multiple consecutive cars from one road at a time and the recently proposed Synchronous Intersection Management Protocol (SIMP) that favors the crossing of multiple cars simultaneously, one from each road. Through experiments in the SUMO simulator, we observe that SIMP promotes more fluid traffic flows, causing traffic throughput to be up to 3.7 times faster and consume less fuel than the RR schemes, with similar results for vehicular emissions (PMx, NOx, CO, CO
₂
, and HC).