On the redundant distributed observability of mixed traffic transportation systems

Abstract In this paper, the problem of distributed state estimation of human-driven vehicles (HDVs) by connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) is investigated in mixed traffic transportation systems. Toward this, a distributed observable state-space model is derived, which paves the way for estimation and observability analysis of HDVs in mixed traffic scenarios. In this direction, first, we obtain the condition on the network topology to satisfy the distributed observability, i.e., the condition such that each HDV state is observable to every CAV via information-exchange over the network. It is shown that strong connectivity of the network, along with the proper design of the observer gain, is sufficient for this. A distributed observer is then designed by locally sharing estimates/observations of each CAV with its neighborhood. Second, in case there exist faulty sensors or unreliable observation data, we derive the condition for redundant distributed observability as a q-node/link-connected network design. This redundancy is achieved by extra information-sharing over the network and implies that a certain number of faulty sensors and unreliable links can be isolated/removed without losing the observability. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.