Optimal mode changes for highway transportation safety

The problem of designing a decentralized advance hazard warning system for highway transportation systems entails the development of efficient switching controllers. In this paper, we represent the vehicle dynamics by a finite number of modes, each of which is represented by a low order transfer function and a constant time delay. The problem of highway safety analysis then gets translated into that of the stability analysis of a parameterized hybrid system. We present an analysis framework and some preliminary original results.