Automated highway systems (AHS) is a concept intended to increase capacity and safety in current surface transportation systems. The design of control systems for AHS is a challenging problem due to their large scale and hybrid nature. This report addresses the problem of traffic control in the AHS hierarchical architecture of the California PATH program. A link layer controller for the PATH AHS architecture is presented. The controller is derived from a principle of conservation of vehicles. Different typologies of highways are considered, including multiple lane highways in which vehicles have different destinations and types. It is assumed that the velocity and the change of lane can be commanded for vehiclesin a stretch of highway. With the use of Lyapunov stability techniques, it is shown that the control laws proposed in this report stabilise the vehicular density and flow around predetermined profiles. This link layer controller exhibits important properties for implementation; it is distributed, in the sense that only local information is used, and avoids highway dynamics inversion. The link layer control schemes were implemented and tested using SmartPath-3 AHS simulation software. Simulation results were in complete agreement with theoretical predictions. (A)
Samenvatting