Conservation Laws, Traffic and Autonomy

The problem of control of large multi-agent systems, such as vehicular traffic, poses many challenges both for the development of mathematical models and their analysis and the application to real systems. First, we discuss how conservation laws can be used for macroscopic description of traffic, then present some results for mean-field limit of controlled systems. Finally, we describe on a recent experiment involving 100 autonomous vehicles to dampen stop-and-go waves on an open highway.