An Interface between Continuous & Discrete - EventControllers for Vehicle

| The work presented here is part of a bigger eeort to design an automated highway system to improve the capacity and safety of the current highways. Automation of highways and in particular platooning of vehicles raises a number of control issues. In the design proposed in 1] these issues are addressed by a hierarchical structure consisting of both discrete event and continuous controllers. Our work is an attempt to construct a consistent interface between these two types of controllers. The proposed design is in the form of a set of nite state machines that interact with the discrete controllers through discrete commands and with the continuous controllers by issuing commands that get translated to inputs for the vehicle actuators. The operation of the proposed design is veriied using COSPAN and tested in simulation. The interface design provides insight into interesting problems related to the hybrid nature of the automated highway system, as it touches on both the discrete and continuous worlds.