Collaborative Research: Scalable Data-Enabled Predictive Control for Heterogeneous Mixed Traffic Systems

这笔赠款将资助通过在人类驾驶的车辆中部署虚拟连接和自动驾驶车辆来提高运输效率和安全性的研究，从而促进科学进步和促进国家繁荣。虽然在没有人类驾驶员的交通系统中，全车辆自动化和车辆间通信对燃油效率和道路安全的潜在好处最大化，但人类驾驶车辆和自动驾驶车辆共存的混合交通场景将成为中期的常态。在这样的环境中控制自动驾驶汽车的一个主要挑战是要求人类驾驶员的行为要么使用显式的汽车跟随模型进行可靠描述，要么使用计算效率高的数据驱动技术进行准确预测，这两种方法目前都不可能实现。该项目旨在通过开发一种新的无模型、数据高效的控制和优化框架来解决这一挑战，该框架将实现快速决策，以实现混合交通系统中多辆互联和自动化车辆的高效、稳健和安全协调。研究结果将通过分享开源软件代码和组织一个有学术界和工业界发言人参加的研讨会传播给研究界和汽车工业。这些努力与旨在提高本科生和高中生参与工程研究的教育和推广活动紧密结合，本研究旨在为互联和自动驾驶车辆开发高效和可扩展的控制设计奠定基础，这些控制设计可以满足实时计算约束并确保混合交通中的安全性能，而无需明确建模人类驾驶车辆的行为。它通过构建一个数据驱动的预测控制框架来实现这一结果，在该框架中，系统级成本函数和约束被协同设计，以直接从输入/输出数据处理未知和不确定的交通动态，并且自适应数据库更新响应时变的交通状况。此外，该研究还致力于开发可扩展的在线数据压缩和分布式优化算法，这些算法利用级联系统结构将集中式预测控制问题分解为较低维度的问题，而不会影响控制性能。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This grant will fund research that enables advancements in transportation efficiency and safety through the deployment of virtually connected and automated vehicles among human-driven vehicles, thereby promoting the progress of science and advancing the national prosperity. While potential benefits for fuel efficiency and road safety from full vehicle automation and vehicle-to-vehicle communication are maximized in a traffic system without human drivers, mixed traffic scenarios with coexistence between human-driven vehicles and automated vehicles will be the norm in the intermediate term. A major challenge to the control of automated vehicles in such environments is the requirement that the behavior of the human drivers either be reliably described using explicit car-following models or accurately predicted using computationally efficient, data-driven techniques, neither of which is currently possible. This project aims to resolve this challenge by developing a new model-free, data-efficient control and optimization framework that will enable fast decision-making for efficient, robust, and safe coordination of multiple connected and automated vehicles in mixed traffic systems. The results will be disseminated to the research community and the automotive industry through sharing of open-source software code and organization of a workshop with speakers from both academia and industry. These efforts are closely integrated with educational and outreach activities that aim to increase the participation of undergraduate and high-school students in engineering research.This research aims to develop the foundations of efficient and scalable control designs for connected and automated vehicles that can meet real-time computational constraints and guarantee safe performance in mixed traffic, without explicit modeling of the behavior of human-driven vehicles. It accomplishes this outcome by building a data-driven predictive control framework in which system-level cost functions and constraints are synergistically designed to handle unknown and uncertain traffic dynamics directly from input/output data, and adaptive data library updates respond to time-varying traffic conditions. Additionally, the research strives to develop algorithms for scalable, online data compression and distributed optimization that exploit cascading system structures to decompose centralized predictive control problems into those of lower dimension without compromising control performance. Extensive simulations and field experiments conducted in collaboration with an industry partner will be used to evaluate the theoretical outcomes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.