Overlapping Internal Boundary Control of Lane-free Automated Vehicle Traffic - An LMI Approach

Internal boundary control (IBC) for lane-free automated vehicle traffic has been recently proposed. The total road width and capacity are flexibly shared between the two opposite traffic directions of a highway in real-time to sensibly increase the cross-road infrastructure utilization. Centralized solutions have already been proposed, which, however, may be cumbersome for long highways with respect to the offline controller design effort; the extent of real-time communications; and the physical system architecture. To mitigate these issues, increase system reliability and reduce monitoring and maintenance effort, this paper proposes an overlapping decentralized control scheme for IBC of lane-free automated vehicle traffic by transforming the discrete-time optimal control problem to a linear matrix inequalities (LMI) problem. After selecting the overlapping structure and solving the LMI problem, the correspondingly structured gain matrix may be obtained, enabling a decentralized overlapping control scheme. Simulation investigations demonstrate that the proposed overlapping regulator is similarly efficient as the centralized solutions.