Traffic Flow on a Ring With a Single Autonomous Vehicle: An Interconnected Stability Perspective

In recent years, field experiments have been performed on ring roadways with human-driven vehicles or with a mix of human-driven and autonomous vehicles. While these experiments demonstrate the potential for controlling traffic flows by a small number of autonomous vehicles, the theoretical framewor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on intelligent transportation systems Vol. 22; no. 8; pp. 4998 - 5008
Main Authors: Giammarino, Vittorio, Baldi, Simone, Frasca, Paolo, Monache, Maria Laura Delle
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York IEEE 01.08.2021
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Asymptotic stability
autonomous vehicle
Autonomous vehicles
Computer Science
control of traffic flow
Control stability
Experiments
Flow stability
Mathematics
Numerical stability
Optimization and Control
ring roadway
Roads
Stability criteria
stability of traffic
String stability
Strings
Structural rings
Systems and Control
Traffic control
Traffic flow
Transfer functions
Vehicles
autonomous vehicle
stability of traffic
ring roadway
String stability
control of traffic flow
ISSN:1524-9050, 1558-0016
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In recent years, field experiments have been performed on ring roadways with human-driven vehicles or with a mix of human-driven and autonomous vehicles. While these experiments demonstrate the potential for controlling traffic flows by a small number of autonomous vehicles, the theoretical framework about such a possibility is to a large extent incomplete. Indeed, most work on mixed traffic focused on classical asymptotical stability notions, neglecting that human drivers are prone to the interconnected instability known in the literature as string instability. This work aims to enhance the existing theories to meet the questions raised by the field experiments. It starts from the observation that the standard notion of string stability on a ring roadway is too demanding for a mixed traffic scenario: therefore, a new interconnected stability definition, named weak ring stability, is proposed. This new interconnected stability notion, in combination with classical stability, is able to explain phenomena observed in field experiments and to highlight possibilities and limitations of traffic control via sparse autonomous vehicle. Furthermore, it allows designing AV controllers with improved string stability specifications, at the price of reducing the sparsity of the autonomous vehicles.
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ISSN:1524-9050
1558-0016
DOI:10.1109/TITS.2020.2985680