Advanced control techniques to mitigate the stop-and-go waves on a highway traffic with different vehicles

In this paper, the behavior of stop-and-go waves present on highways using different types of mobile robots was investigated. The paper illustrates one possible solution to mitigate the stop-and-go waves by designing an appropriated control architecture. Therefore, different control strategies from simple PI controllers to more advanced model based predictive controllers were implemented, tested and validated using simulation. A comparison between the designed controllers and a driver based controller was considered. The revealed results shows that by using a suitable control strategy, the effect of stop-and-go waves can be diminished.