In this talk, we present rhythmic traffic control, a new paradigm of controlling vehicles to traverse a traffic facility such as a signal-free intersection and a traffic network, in a fully automated vehicle (AV) environment. The fundamental idea of rhythmic control is to determine an underlying beat for the traffic facility and then require AVs to follow the beat and a design speed to enter and traverse the facility; the start of the beat for each conflicting movement is carefully synchronized so that vehicles will pass through a conflict point in an alternating and collision-free manner without any stop. We show that this new control paradigm is simple, but yields superior performance compared with previous paradigms or proposals, and is computationally tractable and thus scalable.
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