Control Strategies for Mixed Autonomy Traffic Systems: Theory, Simulations and Real-life Experiments.

The recent and rapid emergence of disruptive technologies is dramatically changing how traffic is monitored and managed in our cities. They will contribute to generate new knowledge and capabilities to design and implement innovative transport policies. In this talk, we will show how we can exploit new technologies to improve traffic management. We will focus on control strategies for traffic systems with the aid of small fleets of connected and automated vehicles immersed in human driven traffic flow. We will prove analytically and numerically how the proposed control theory can improve traffic performance and finally, we will present the MegaVanderTest, a test involving 100 connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). The MegaVanderTest is to our knowledge the field test which achieved the largest concentration of CAVs collaboratively controlling traffic on a single stretch of freeway.