Traffic Control by Isolated or Platoons of Autonomous Vehicles

We strongly coupled PDE-ODE systems modelling the influence of controlled single vehicles or platoons on the surrounding road traffic. The models consist of a conservation law with discontinuous flux describing the main traffic evolution and ODEs accounting for the trajectories of the slower vehicles, which depend on the downstream traffic conditions. The moving constraint is operated by an inequality on the flux, which accounts for the bottleneck created on the road by the presence of the controlled vehicles. We present a finite volume scheme able to capture exactly the non-classical discontinuities that may arise at the constraint position. Optimal control problems for traffic management are then addressed numerically.
Dr. Paola Goatin is currently Research Director at Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée and leader of the project-team ACUMES (Analysis and Control of Unsteady Models for Engineering Sciences). Before joining Inria in 2010, she held an Associate Professor position at Toulon University. She got her PhD in Applied Mathematics from SISSA-ISAS (Italy) and her Habilitation in Mathematics from Toulon University .Paola Goatin is an expert of analysis and numerical simulation of hyperbolic systems of conservation laws, with special focus on traffic flow applications. From 2010 to 2016 she held an ERC Starting Grant on “Traffic Management by Macroscopic models”. In 2014, she was awarded the Inria - Académie des Sciences prize for young researchers. She is author of more than 70 articles published on international journals and 25 conference proceedings.