Platoon-actuated variable area mainstream traffic control for bottleneck decongestion

In this paper a platoon-actuated mainstream traffic control is proposed to decongest bottlenecks due to recurrent and nonrecurrent events. Indeed, differently from traditional mainstream control strategies, i.e., control strategies applied with fixed actuators, platoon-actuated control can be applied at any location on the freeway. In this work, the control actions to be communicated to the platoons, i.e., speed and configuration, are defined by means of a predictive control law based on traffic and platoon state detected in an area identified immediately upstream of the bottleneck. The main peculiarity of this scheme is that the size of the controlled area is dynamically adjusted based on the predicted congestion at the bottleneck. This approach keeps the control law computation burden low, while not sacrificing much control performance. Specifically, the number of platoons to be controlled and the time at which the platoons begin to be controlled depend from the size of the controlled area. Simulation results reported in the paper show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, eliminating from 60% to 80% of the delay incurred from congestion compared with the uncontrolled case, depending on the level of traffic.