Freeway networks as Systems of Systems: An event-triggered distributed control scheme

The objective of the present paper is the design of a control scheme for effectively managing congestion phenomena in freeways and interurban roadways. Such systems are typically made of several road stretches connected to compose a network and, of course, the dynamic behavior of traffic in each stretch influences the state of traffic in the overall network. In this sense a freeway network can be considered and analyzed as a “System of Systems”. A distributed Model Predictive Control Scheme in which clusters of freeway cells are separately regulated is proposed in the paper. Moreover, the definition of an event-triggered scheme is included in the paper as well: in the proposed scheme the control action is not computed at each time instant as in the classical Model Predictive Control framework, but only when the system state fulfils specific conditions,.