Traffic Wave Damping: A Shared Control Approach

Traffic waves, also known as “phantom jams”, are caused by the instability of the system describing the dynamics of traffic flow on highways: slight disturbances in the distribution of vehicles on highways are amplified when the density of the traffic is higher than a certain critical value and eventually generate traffic waves and “stop-and-go” phenomena. We propose a solution to the traffic wave damping problem via shared-control on vehicles and show that the effectiveness of the proposed controller does not depend on human drivers' actions. In other terms, with the developed shared-controller the amplitude of the traffic wave is reduced regardless of the action of the drivers. Simulation results on a traffic control benchmark demonstrating the effectiveness of the controller are also provided.