Traffic control via moving bottlenecks of coordinated vehicles

The thesis, entitled "Traffic flow control via automated vehicles", has the purpose of investigating the possibility of properly controlling moving bottlenecks to improve the traffic flow, prospective that is particularly attractive in a context of autonomous vehicles development. The traffic is represented by means of an existing model that adapts the classical Lighthill--Whitham--Richards (LWR) macroscopic traffic model to take into account interactions with a generic slow moving vehicle that has its own speed different from the rest of the flow. This controlled vehicle is considered as a moving bottleneck which interacts with the surrounding flow modifying the traffic density and the flow speed profiles. Hence, its speed is assumed as control variable in order to get, by using a MPC (Model Predictive Control) approach, benefits in terms of some prescribed cost functionals, as the amount of pollutants emission, the fuel consumption and the travel time.

Controllo del traffico tramite veicoli coordinati al fine di creare "bottleneck" mobili