Performance-Barrier Event-Triggered PDE Control of Traffic Flow

For stabilizing stop-and-go oscillations in traffic flow by actuating a variable speed limit (VSL) at a downstream boundary of a freeway segment, we introduce event-triggered partial differential equation (PDE) backstepping designs employing the recent concept of performance-barrier event-triggered control (P-ETC). Our design is for linearized hyperbolic Aw–Rascle–Zhang (ARZ) PDEs governing traffic velocity and density. Compared to continuous feedback, ETC provides a piecewise-constant VSL commands—more likely to be obeyed by human drivers. Unlike the existing “regular” ETC (R-ETC), which enforces conservatively a strict decrease of a Lyapunov function, our performance-barrier (P-ETC) approach permits an increase, as long as the Lyapunov function remains below a performance barrier, resulting in fewer control updates than R-ETC. To relieve VSL from continuously monitoring the triggering function, we also develop periodic event-triggered (PETC) and self-triggered (STC) versions of both R-ETC and P-ETC. These are referred to as R/P-PETC and R/P-STC, respectively, and we show that they both guarantee Zeno-free behavior and exponential convergence in the spatial $L^{2}$ norm. With comparative simulations, we illustrate the benefits of the performance-barrier designs through traffic metrics (driver comfort, safety, travel time, fuel consumption). The proposed algorithms reduce discomfort nearly in half relative to driver behavior without VSL, while tripling the driver safety, measured by the average dwell time, relative to the R-ETC frequent-switching VSL schedule.