Internal Boundary Control of Lane-Free Automated Vehicle Traffic using a Model-Free Adaptive Controller

Abstract In lane-free traffic, recently proposed for connected automated vehicles (CAV), incremental changes of the road width lead to corresponding incremental changes of the traffic flow capacity. This property enables the controlled shifting of the internal road boundary separating the two opposite traffic directions, so as to optimize the road infrastructure utilization. Internal boundary control aims at flexible sharing of the total road width and capacity among the two traffic directions of a road in real-time-, in response to the prevailing traffic conditions. A model-free adaptive control scheme is applied to efficiently address this problem. Simulation investigations, involving a realistic highway stretch and challenging demand scenario, demonstrate that the efficiency of the proposed control scheme.