Real-Time In-Domain Congestion Control for the LWR Traffic Model via Control Barrier Functions

Abstract: This paper presents a control barrier function-based method for real-time in-domain congestion control of the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards traffic model. Traffic congestion is formulated as a distributed safety control problem, leading to a infinite-dimensional optimization problem. Through the discretization and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) analysis, the problem is converted into a high-dimensional quadratic program. A structure-exploiting primal-dual active set algorithm is then developed to compute the safe control input in real time, with convergence guarantees. Numerical simulations with different nominal controllers demonstrate the effectiveness and real-time feasibility of the proposed approach.