Robust Traffic Wave Damping via Shared Control

The traffic wave damping problem in a circular single lane track is addressed and solved via a shared control technique which takes a model of the human drivers’ driving habits into consideration. A formal analysis shows that the effectiveness of the proposed shared controller does not depend on the parameters of the human driver’s model, which is an important property in the implementation of the shared controller, since these parameters are difficult to measure, and vary from one human driver to another and from one driving situation to another. In addition, the proposed control law is robust: the stop-and-go wave can be dampened and there is no collisions among vehicles even if there is noise on the information each vehicle receives from the higher level traffic control center. A comparison between performances of the vehicles with and without the proposed control scheme demonstrates the robustness and the effectiveness of the shared control solution.