Supervisory control for collision avoidance in vehicular networks using discrete event abstractions

We consider the problem of collision avoidance at vehicular intersections for a set of controlled and uncontrolled vehicles that are linked by wireless communication. Each vehicle is modeled by a first order system. We use a disturbance to account for bounded model uncertainty. We construct a discrete event system abstraction and formulate the problem in the context of supervisory control for discrete event systems with uncontrollable events. This allows us to mitigate computational limitations related to the presence of continuous dynamics and infinite state spaces. For solving the resulting supervisory control problem at the discrete event level, we develop an algorithm that exploits the structure of the transition map to compute the supremal controllable sublanguage more efficiently than standard algorithms. We present implementation results on an intersection with several vehicles.