Traffic Planning and Control at Urban Intersections

Dear Colleagues,

Urban traffic planning is a fertile area of smart cities to improve efficiency, environmental care, and safety because traffic jams and congestion are one of the biggest sources of pollution and noise. Enhancing the vehicular traffic flow becomes a mandatory task to minimize the impact of pollutant emissions and unsustainable fuel consumption in cities. Smart mobility optimization therefore emerges, with the goal of improving traffic management in the city.

Traffic lights and autonomous intersections play an important role in solving these problems because they control the flow of the vehicular network. However, the increasing number of vehicles makes it necessary to go from local control at a single intersection to a holistic approach considering a large urban area and a network of several intersections; this is only possible using advanced computational resources and techniques.

Moreover, the arrival of autonomous and connected vehicles (ACVs) that share space with other road users further complicates the urban traffic management problem. It would therefore be interesting to consider that the conflicting space is negotiated through complex interactions involving signaling, 5G/G5 communication, and communicative behavior. Indeed, autonomous vehicles communicate with each other and with the road infrastructure to jointly decide how best to traverse the conflicting space to generate time and energy savings. Similarly, these autonomous vehicles and pedestrians optimize their respective trajectories thanks to communicative behavior.

This Special Issue will be dedicated to new perspectives in control, optimization and decision-support techniques for conflict situations, especially at signalized intersections or at autonomous and connected intersections. It will cover a selection of recent research articles, short communications, reviews, as well as perspectives in the area of intelligent transportation systems and connected and autonomous driving, especially linked to traffic signals and intelligent intersection control.

Dr. Mahjoub Dridi
Guest Editor

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• cooperative driving
• traffic control
• urban mobility
• combinatorial optimization