Practically string stable, lateral control solution for a homogeneous platoon of vehicles: A centralized vs distributed approach

The world is becoming increasingly congested due to a continuous growth of world population and overall wealth. Current road capacity limitations will lead to a significant decrease of traffic flow accompanied by a serious increase in global fuel consumption and air pollution. Ever-expanding road infrastructure is not expected to be a...

Traffic Flow on a Ring with a Single Autonomous Vehicle: An Interconnected Stability Perspective

In recent years, field experiments have been performed on ring roadways with human-driven vehicles or with a mix of human-driven and autonomous vehicles. While these experiments demonstrate the potential for controlling traffic flows by a small number of autonomous vehicles, the theoretical framework about such a possibility is to a large...

A Lateral Control Solution for Cooperative Vehicle Platooning Applications

Vehicle platooning is often regarded as one of the most promising solutions for solving the road congestion issues. Experiments have successfully proven that longitudinal platooning can be safely achieved in real world applications using a platoon of several vehicles. Lateral control however, has received far less attention. The main difficulty...

Analysis and Control of Mixed Traffic Flow on a Ring with a Single Autonomous Vehicle

This thesis provides a theoretical framework for the arise of stop-and-go waves in platoons of Human-driven Vehicles (HVs) on a ring road topology. Possibilities and limitations for traffic control and suppression of such waves via a single Autonomous Vehicle (AV) are considered. Being HVs prone to show string instability, i.e. a type of...

Event-Triggered Control for Vehicle Platooning: Application to heterogeneous platoons

This thesis covers the implementation of Event-Triggering Control (ETC) on Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). CACC has the potential to increase road capacity, by having safe vehicle following with small intervehicle distance (less than 1 second), to increase traffic flow by eliminating shockwave effects, such that string-stable...

Infrastructure assisted adaptive driving to stabilise heterogeneous vehicle strings

Literature has shown potentials of Connected/Cooperative Automated Vehicles (CAVs) in improving highway operations, especially on roadway capacity and flow stability. However, benefits were also shown to be negligible at low market penetration rates. This work develops a novel adaptive driving strategy for CAVs to stabilise heterogeneous...

String-stable automated steering in cooperative driving applications

The ever-increasing road transport demand in the developing and the developed world has resulted in road-traffic networks nearing maximum capacity. Traditional approaches to this problem, such as increasing road capacity, do not offer long-term solutions. Combined with rising environmental concerns, the demand for smarter solutions has never...