A Continuous Petri Net Approach for Model Predictive Control of Traffic Systems
Jorge Júlvez, Rene K. Boel · IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics - Part A Systems and Humans · 2010
Traffic systems are often highly populated discrete event systems that exhibit several modes of behavior such as free flow traffic, traffic jams, stop-and-go waves, etc. An appropriate closed loop control of the congested system is crucial in order to avoid undesirable behavior. This paper proposes a macroscopic model based on continuous Petri nets as a tool for designing control laws that improve the behavior of traffic systems. The main reason to use a continuous model is to avoid the state explosion problem inherent to large discrete event systems. The obtained model captures the different operation modes of a traffic system and is highly compositional. In order to handle the variability of the traffic conditions, a model predictive control strategy is proposed and validated.