Distributed control of strings of vehicles in automated highway systems

Abstract

In this thesis, distributed control of vehicular arrays is studied. The main approach is to design distributed controllers, where the vehicle interconnections repeated in the controllers. The spatially distributed nature of the vehicular array, and the presence of interconnections make the sharing of feedback information necessary and challenging. This factor has motivated new research direction to distributed control for strings of vehicles. The main objective of this thesis is to attenuate disturbance signals, which is imposed by the leader, in the spatial direction. The uniqueness of our design is the communication channel between controllers similar to the idea in distributed control. Well-posedness, stability and dissipativity conditions of interconnected systems are given in terms of LMIs. The controllers are designed such that the L2-gain of the closed loop system minimized. Also a method for the construction of node by node distributed controllers presented, similar to LPV control synthesis. We designed identical controllers for all interior vehicles, and two di erent controllers placed at boundaries. And, our simulation results show that the resulting controllers could attenuate disturbance signals in the spatial direction, successfully.