A sliding mode controller for vehicular traffic flow

This study proposes a sliding mode controller for vehicular traffic flow based on a car-following model to enhance the smoothness and stability of traffic flow evolution. In particular, the full velocity difference (FVD) model is used to capture the characteristics of vehicular traffic flow. The proposed sliding mode controller is designed in terms of the error between the desired space headway and the actual space headway. The stability of the controller is guaranteed using the Lyapunov technique. Numerical experiments are used to compare the performance of sliding mode control (SMC) with that of feedback control. The results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed SMC method in terms of the distribution smoothness and stability of the space headway, velocity, and acceleration profiles. They further illustrate that the SMC strategy is superior to that of the feedback control strategy, while enabling computational efficiency that can aid in practical applications.