Assessing and Restoring ``Traffic-State Order'' in Open, Irreversible, Dynamically Routed, Zone-Controlled Guidepath-Based Transport Systems

The notion of the ``h-ordered'' traffic state provides an efficient approach for maintaining liveness in an open, irreversible, dynamically routed zone-controlled guidepath-based transport system. The restriction of these transport systems in their class of h-ordered states can be performed with polynomial complexity with respect to the size of these systems, while the resulting supervisory control policy retains high levels of operational latitude. The work presented in this article provides novel efficient algorithms for the following two problems: 1) assessing whether a given traffic state is h-ordered; and 2) bringing the underlying transport system from some general traffic state to the class of its h-ordered states in a way that minimizes a certain measure of ``operational disruption.'' The developed algorithms are motivated by, and find immediate applicability, in the model predictive control (MPC) scheme for the considered transport systems that was developed in