Constrained H∞ control of urban transportation network

Because transportation systems involve massive complex human activities, there exist substantial unpredictable uncertainties of the traffic demands. This paper aims at presenting an H_∞ control method for transportation network that can enhance the tolerance of the system due to these uncertainties. In particular, the store‐and‐forward approach is applied to model the system into a linear form. Then, a detailed controllability analysis shows that the system is not completely controllable by taking the constraints on the green times into account. This makes difficult to apply directly the H_∞ method. To overcome this difficulty, this paper isolates the fully controllable part of the transportation system, and the problem of disturbance attenuation is then solved by means of a convex optimization with linear matrix inequality. Finally, the simulation of a large‐scale hypothetical network is carried out to illustrate the results. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.