Preservation of Traffic Liveness in MPC Schemes for Guidepath-based Transport Systems

Guidepath-based transport systems is a pertinent abstraction for the traffic that is generated in many contemporary applications, ranging from industrial material handling and robotics, to computer game animations and the qubit transport systems that are employed in quantum computing. In some recent works of ours, we have proposed the traffic coordination in this class of systems according to a model predictive control (MPC) scheme that seeks to maximize the traffic throughput while retaining computational tractability for the corresponding scheduling problem. In this work we perform a more systematic investigation of the conditions that must be observed by the adopted MPC scheme in order to ensure the liveness of the resulting traffic. The presented results span a number of possible configurations of the underlying guidepath-based transport systems, and integrate and extend a variety of past results concerning the liveness-enforcing supervision of AGV and other complex resource allocation systems.