Centralized and Decentralized Schemes for Platoon Control in Freeway Traffic Systems

This paper proposes two control architectures to regulate traffic in freeway networks by exploiting the presence of platoons of autonomous and connected vehicles. The idea is based on the assumption that each platoon can be considered as a moving bottleneck that affects the surrounding traffic conditions and then can be adopted as an actuator of traffic control strategies. In this work, the speed of the platoon is considered as a control variable whose profile is defined through two control architectures. In the first scheme, which is a centralized one, the control action is defined by a network supervisor which has complete knowledge of the overall system and also makes predictions about the systems state. In the second scheme which is decentralized, a link supervisor acting in each link of the network is defined. The two schemes are discussed and their effectiveness is analyzed by means of simulations.

I. Introduction

Freeway traffic control has been studied by researchers for some decades, not only with the purpose of efficiently exploiting the road capacity and reducing travel times, but also in order to achieve the targets associated with a more sustainable vision of mobility (see e.g. [1]).