Design of an Automated Highway System

Pravin Varaiya, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley

Proponents of Intelligent Vehicle/Highway System or IVHS see it as a new technology that will make a major improvement in highway transportation. Control, communication and computing technologies will be combined into an IVHS system that can significantly increase safety and highway capacity without building new roads. This talk outlines key features of one highly automated IVHS system and proposes a hierarchical control architecture for it. Hybrid models are proposed for the specification and verification of the control system design. We show how existing software can be used to verify some limited features of the design. We point to open problems in theory and software support.