Abstract
Traffic congestion has large economic and social costs. The introduction of autonomous vehicles can potentially reduce this congestion, both by increasing network throughput and by enabling a social planner to incentivize users of autonomous vehicles to take longer routes that can alleviate congestion on more direct roads. We formalize these effects of altruistic autonomy on roads shared between human drivers and autonomous vehicles. In this work, we develop a formal model of road congestion on shared roads based on the fundamental diagram of traffic. We consider a network of parallel roads and provide algorithms that compute optimal equilibria that are robust to additional unforeseen demand. We further plan for optimal routings when users have varying degrees of altruism. We find that even with arbitrarily small altruism, total latency can be unboundedly better than without altruism, and that the best selfish equilibrium can be unboundedly better than the worst selfish equilibrium. We validate our theoretical results through microscopic traffic simulations and show average latency decrease of a factor of 4 from worst-case selfish equilibrium to the optimal equilibrium when autonomous vehicles are altruistic.
E. Bıyık and D. A. Lazar—First two authors contributed equally and are listed in alphabetical order.
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Notes
- 1.
Due to space constraints, we defer all proofs to this paper’s extended version [14].
- 2.
Though congested flow may be unstable, it can be stabilized with a small number of autonomous vehicles [7], adding an additional constraint to later optimizations.
- 3.
This is similar to the notion of epsilon-approximate Nash Equilibrium [31], but with populations playing strategies that bring them within some factor of the best strategy available to them, with each population having a different factor.
- 4.
An animated version can be found at http://youtu.be/Hy2S6zbL6Z0 with realistic numerical values for densities, headways, car lengths, speeds, etc.
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Acknowledgments
Toyota Research Institute (“TRI”) provided funds to assist the authors with their research but this article solely reflects the opinions and conclusions of its authors and not TRI or any other Toyota entity. This work was also supported by NSF grant CCF-1755808 and UC Office of the President grant LFR-18-548175.
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Bıyık, E., Lazar, D.A., Pedarsani, R., Sadigh, D. (2020). Altruistic Autonomy: Beating Congestion on Shared Roads. In: Morales, M., Tapia, L., Sánchez-Ante, G., Hutchinson, S. (eds) Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics XIII. WAFR 2018. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44051-0_51
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