Traffic Control in a Mine Tunnel: A Scheduled Approach in a Connected and Automated Vehicle Environment

Traffic congestion exists widely in the underground transportation of mines, which damages the mobility of the traffic system and brings safety hazards. Leveraging the advantages of connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technologies, this study proposes a novel approach for efficiently organizing vehicles in a scheduled manner. With the implementation of vehicle-infrastructure cooperation, CAVs are supposed to travel with the pace of the space-time passages that are designed on each link to fulfill their trips. In addition, vehicle trajectories are elaborately optimized to reduce vehicle delays in their trips under the premise of guaranteeing traffic safety. To validate the performance of the proposed methods, numerical experiments are tested under different traffic demand settings. The results verify that the proposed method could organize the traffic efficiently and in an orderly manner, reflected in eliminating extra delays of CAVs at intersections and concurrently guaranteeing collision avoidance.