Overlapping Internal Boundary Control of Lane-free Automated Vehicle Traffic with State and Input Inclusion *

Abstract

Lane-free vehicle driving has been recently proposed for connected automated vehicles. Lane-free traffic implies that incremental changes of the road width lead to corresponding incremental changes of the traffic flow capacity. Internal boundary control (IBC) was introduced to flexibly share the total road width and capacity among the two traffic directions of a highway in real-time, so as to maximize the cross-road infrastructure utilization. Centralized solutions, requiring information from the whole highway stretch under consideration, have already been proposed, which, however, may be problematic for long highways with respect to the required communications and physical system architecture in real-time operation. This paper introduces an overlapping decentralized control scheme for IBC of lane-free automated vehicle traffic, based on a contractible controller, which is designed in a decomposed way (per subsystem) for an extended system. Simulation investigations, involving a realistic highway stretch and demand scenario, demonstrate that the proposed decentralized regulator is similarly efficient as the centralized solutions.