The coordination is based on internal vehicle intelligence (related to environment perception and self-driving capabilities) and communication with other vehicles as well as with the smart infrastructure based on connectivity technologies as 5G. To enable coordinated driving behavior, Swarm Intelligence (SI) technology builds up onto the Automated Driving (AD) framework. Within this framework, shared collaborative decision rules and coordination of movements enhance the ability to withstand external disturbances and measurement errors.

The smart infrastructure senses the upcoming vehicles with environment sensors (vision and/or radars) and short-range communication. It builds a comprehensive environmental model (EM) and the generated list of objects is shared via specific wireless communication to the vehicles. The vehicle – infrastructure cooperation is not exploited enough nowadays; thus, the unawareness of other traffic participants’ trajectories in intersections can lead to unoptimized path planning. As such, a significant benefit would be here for automated driving (AD) vehicles. Moreover, concepts of Swarm Intelligence can be incorporated in order to improve the ego vehicle path planning by optimizing a general goal related to traffic flow at the network level, through coordinated control actions. This can be even further improved by incorporating information received from nearby vehicles. Traffic and driving simulators (e.g., SUMO, CARLA, SUMMIT, VISSIM), based on synthetic and collected data will pre-validate the proposed solutions.

But not only the AD vehicles can benefit from the knowledge of Intersection EM. Safety of the road users inspires the Vision Zero (zero accidents, zero fatalities) for all stakeholders, be it manufacturers or road authorities. The EM information can be used to protect road users (especially vulnerable road users like pedestrians, bicycle, or e-scooter riders) in possibly dangerous situations, like occluded incoming traffic.

In sum, this Use Case consists of the implementation of traffic management features using multi-access edge computing (MEC) capabilities to enable low-latency V2X communication, divided into two categories, one supporting traffic efficiency and the other one traffic safety.