A unified approach to the vehicle-merging problem

This paper considers the problem of deciding the best way of merging two strings of highspeed vehicles into a single guideway as well as the design of the control system required to accomplish this task. It is shown that both the optimal merging sequence and the control system can be determined by casting the problem into the framework of controlling a linear time-invariant system with quadratic performance criteria. The required control system is shown to be a linear time- invariant feedback system.