Roads/Highways

Automation of highways and in particular platooning of vehicles raises a number of control issues. A hierarchical structure is used to address these issues. The work presented here is an attempt at constructing a consistent interface between discrete event and continuous time controllers. The design proposed is a finite state machine that communicates with the discrete controllers by issuing commands that get translated to "jerk" input for the vehicle engine. The operation of the proposed design is tested using COSPAN. By virtue of the fact that the interface touches on both the discrete...

Between 2017 and 2019, California experienced a series of devastating wildfires that together led over one million people to be ordered to evacuate. Due to the speed of many of these wildfires, residents across California found themselves in challenging evacuation situations, often at night and with little time to escape. These evacuations placed considerable stress on public resources and infrastructure for both transportation and sheltering. In the face of these clear challenges, transportation and emergency management agencies across California have widely varying levels of preparedness...

In this report, the authors develop two new nonlinear spacing policies, variable time headway and variable separation error gain, designed to all but eliminate the undesirable side effect of large steady-state intervehicle spacings. This disadvantage is pronounced in heavy-duty vehicles, which require larger time headways due to their low actuation-to- weight ratio. The first policy significantly reduces the transient errors and allows for the use of much smaller spacings in autonomous platoon operation, while the second one results in smoother and more robust longitudinal control.

This paper presents a study of vehicle traction control and discusses its importance in highway automation. A robust control strategy is designed for slip control, which in turn controls the traction. It is shown how traction control can be used to satisfy different objectives of vehicle control. The importance of traction is further emphasized by comparing its performance to passive controllers in a simulation study in which an impulse-like wind disturbance is introduced. The comparative study shows that the system under traction control is stable in the presence of external disturbances...