Decentralized delayed-feedback control of an optimal velocity traffic model

The jam phenomenon in traffic flow wastes not only considerable traffic-transportation time but also great amounts of fuel due to many accelerate-decelerate actions. From traffic-economic and traffic-pollution viewpoints, the suppression of traffic jam is an important issue we have to solve. The present paper shows that -norm, which has been used in the field of control theory, can reveal the traffic jam phenomenon in an optimal velocity traffic model under an open boundary condition. Furthermore, we suppress the traffic jam in the model by the decentralized delayed-feedback control method. Some numerical simulations are shown to verify our theoretical results. Received 27 October 1999