An Optimal Vehicle-Scheduling Model for Signal-Free Intersections Considering Bus Priority in a Connected and...

The optimal scheduling of vehicles at signal-free intersections under the connected and automated vehicle (CAV) environment has become a research hotspot in the intelligent transportation field. However, existing studies often oversimplify the intersection's conflict area and fail to adequately address the spatiotemporal sparsity of conflict points, with little attention given to bus priority requirements. To address these gaps, this paper first establishes an intersection coordinate system and constructs a conflict area analysis model based on the coordinates of key conflict points and vehicle trajectories. Subsequently, an optimal scheduling model for automated vehicles at signal-free intersections with bus priority is developed, which considers the set of vehicles influencing decisions within a time window and uses vehicle entry times and lateral lane changes as decision variables. To enhance computational speed while preserving convergence accuracy, a search space reduction method based on available gaps for conflict point traversal constraints is designed. The model is then solved using an improved double-layer multi-population particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Simulation results, compared against traditional signal control, rule-driven signal-free, and dynamic-optimization-based signal-free algorithms demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a favorable balance between computational cost and efficiency. It significantly reduces the average vehicle delay. Moreover, incorporating bus priority reduces the average per capita delay by 18.95% compared to the non-priority scenario, effectively proving the validity of the proposed method.