Traffic Congestion Control Using Distributed Extremum Seeking and Filtered Feedback Linearization Control Approaches

This letter presents a hierarchical infrastructure-based control algorithm to manage mainstream traffic flow on freeways. At the upper level, a distributed Extremum-Seeking control approach is employed to determine the optimal density of vehicles in a congested cell. The local objective function is defined such that the average flow within the target cell is maximized to resolve the congestion, and the flow difference with its upstream cell is minimized to prevent back-propagating the congestion. At the lower level, a distributed Filtered Feedback Linearization controller is used to update the suggested velocity communicated to the vehicles so that the desired density determined by the upper level can be achieved in each cell. We adopted the METANET model to describe the aggregated dynamics of the traffic network. We tested the performance of these controllers via a MATLAB-VISSIM COM interface. The results demonstrate that the designed distributed controllers can achieve the desired closed-loop performance despite unknown disturbances in an uncertain large-scale traffic network.