A Control-Oriented Highway Traffic Model with Multiple Clusters of CAVs

The presented work falls in the field of modelling the presence of multiple clusters of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), i.e., groups of CAVs in traffic flow that, if properly controlled, can positively influence traffic behavior by acting as actuators of specific control strategies. An extended version of the well-known Cell Transmission Model (CTM) is used as a traffic model, where the cells of a highway stretch are divided into two types: cells with clusters of CAVs and cells without. The classical CTM is used to model the second type of cells, while for the first type we model the presence of a cluster as a moving bottleneck that divides the cell into different parts. The proposed control-oriented traffic model has been tested on a case study based on real traffic data.