Internal Boundary Control of Lane-free Automated Vehicle Traffic using a Linear Quadratic Integral Regulator

Lane-free traffic has been recently proposed for connected automated vehicles (CAV). As incremental changes of the road width in lane-free traffic lead to corresponding incremental changes of the traffic flow capacity, the concept of internal boundary control can be used to optimize infrastructure utilization. Internal boundary control leads to flexible sharing of the total road width and capacity among the two traffic directions (of a highway or an arterial) in real-time, in response to the prevailing traffic conditions. A feedback-based Linear-Quadratic regulator with Integral action (LQI regulator) is appropriately developed in this paper to efficiently address this problem. Simulation investigations, involving a realistic highway stretch, demonstrate that the proposed simple LQI regulator is robust and very efficient.