Synchronous Roundabouts with Rotating Priority Sectors (SYROPS): High Capacity and Safety for Conventional and Autonomous Vehicles

• Main Authors: Guillermo Ibanez, Tobias Meuser, Miguel A. Lopez-Carmona, Diego Lopez-Pajares
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-10-01
• Series: Electronics
• Subjects: roundabouts; road-traffic engineering; road-traffic signaling; intelligent transport systems; connected vehicles; traffic safety
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/9/10/1726

Roundabouts are a highway engineering concept meant to reduce congestion and improve safety. However, experience shows that capacity of roundabouts is limited, and safety is not optimal. However, these improvements in capacity and safety should be compatible with both manually-driven and autonomous vehicles. Incorporating existing advanced technologies to the signaling and control of roundabouts will undoubtedly contribute to these improvements but should not restrict this compatibility. We approach roundabouts as synchronous switches of vehicles, and propose a roundabout system (synchronous roundabouts with rotating priorities) based on vehicle platoons arriving at the roundabout at a uniform speed and within the time slot assigned to their entry, avoiding conflicts and stops. The proposed signaling system is visual for human drivers and wireless for connected and autonomous vehicles. We evaluated analytically and with simulations roundabouts of different radii for several values of the average distance between vehicles. Results show that average delays are 28.7% lower, with negligible dispersion. The capacity improvements depend on design parameters, moderate for small roundabouts, but that goes up to 70–100% for short inter vehicular distances and medium and large roundabouts. Simulations with unbalanced traffic maintained the capacity improvement over standard roundabouts.