An object-oriented design of the hybrid controller for automated vehicles in an AHS

Recently, designs for the automated highway systems (AHS) to improve the safety and efficiency of highways have attracted much attention. However, such large-scale and complex dynamic systems present a number of control issues. Part of the complication comes from the hybrid nature of these systems, which consists of both time-driven and event-driven dynamics. In this paper, an object-oriented approach towards a hybrid controller design for automated vehicles in an AHS is proposed. First, the unified modeling language (UML) is extended to model the hybrid controller with a clear and natural representation of the discrete event and continuous time behaviors. Then, since the AHS is typically a multi-agent system, the simulation of which is suitable to implementation by multi-threaded programming, a Java-based library is further developed to support the implementation. In our framework, Java provides an implementation path, while the extended UML provides a reverse engineering path for the hybrid controller design.