Control design of traffic flow using look-ahead vehicles to increase energy efficiency

The paper presents a design strategy of the traffic flow with vehicles using look-ahead cruise control methods. The purpose of the coordination is to improve the energy efficiency of the vehicles, while the stability and the performance of the traffic system are guaranteed. The impact of the look-ahead cruise control on the traffic flow is analyzed. A new model concerning a polynomial form of the nonlinearity of the traffic flow is proposed, in which the look-ahead cruise control is constructed by a parameter-dependent model. Since the minimization of the energy demand of the traffic flow and the reduction of the queue length in the controlled lanes of the network lead to different solutions, a balance between these requirements must be achieved by an optimization procedure. In the optimal control of the traffic system the maximum Controlled Invariant Set based on the Sum-of-Squares (SOS) programming method is applied. The resulting set uses a selection of the intervention possibilities such as the input flow on the controlled gates and the optimization parameters of the look-ahead controlled vehicles. The high-fidelity VISSIM traffic simulator is applied to illustrate the results.