FAULT-TOLERANT CONTROL FOR AUTOMATED HIGHWAY SYSTEMS

Increasing highway traffic congestion and real estate costs that limit the building of new highways has brought about a renewed interest in an Automated Highway System (AHS) where the vehicle steering task (''l ateral control'') and the braking/throttle tasks (''longitudinal contr ol'') are taken over by computers to increase the throughput of existi ng highways. Since safety plays a key role in the development of an AH S, fault-tolerant control is vital. In this paper, we develop a robust longitudinal sliding-mode control algorithm and prove that this contr ol algorithm is stable for a certain class of faults, In addition, we show that intervehicle spacing errors will not become amplified along the AHS in the event of a loss of lead vehicle information, The perfor mance of the sliding-mode controller is demonstrated through a series of simulations incorporating various vehicle and AHS faults.