Control Barrier Function Based Speed Control for Fixed-Line Transit Headway Management

George Gunter, Jose Paolo Talusan, Dan Freudberg, Abhishek Dubey, Aron Laszka

Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC) 2026

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Abstract

We present a control barrier function (CBF) approach for headway management in fixed-line transit systems (FTLSs) through vehicular speed control. We frame headway management as a formal property in terms of vehicle time-differences. Using a dynamical model of vehicle speed control, we develop a combined CBF quadratic-programming (QP) supervisory approach. The CBF-QP supervises control speed inputs for forward-invariance of minimum and maximum time-differences between vehicles. While the need for vehicles to stop creates modeling error that can lead to property violations, the CBFs can recover back to satisfying the time-gap properties after violations. We present numerical experiments that compare the CBF-QP approach to other controllers. We find that the CBF-QP approach is able to supervise a poorly performing controller to achieve significantly improved headway regularity. We additionally compare the CBF-QP with an existing linear-quadratic control approach and find that the CBF-QP performs similarly or better.

Cite This Paper

@inproceedings{gunter2026control,
  author = {Gunter, George and Talusan, Jose Paolo and Freudberg, Dan and Dubey, Abhishek and Laszka, Aron},
  title = {Control Barrier Function Based Speed Control for Fixed-Line Transit Headway Management},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC)},
  year = {2026},
  month = {sep},
  address = {Naples, Italy},
  abstract = {We present a control barrier function (CBF) approach for headway management in fixed-line transit systems (FTLSs) through vehicular speed control. We frame headway management as a formal property in terms of vehicle time-differences. Using a dynamical model of vehicle speed control, we develop a combined CBF quadratic-programming (QP) supervisory approach. The CBF-QP supervises control speed inputs for forward-invariance of minimum and maximum time-differences between vehicles. While the need for vehicles to stop creates modeling error that can lead to property violations, the CBFs can recover back to satisfying the time-gap properties after violations. We present numerical experiments that compare the CBF-QP approach to other controllers. We find that the CBF-QP approach is able to supervise a poorly performing controller to achieve significantly improved headway regularity. We additionally compare the CBF-QP with an existing linear-quadratic control approach and find that the CBF-QP performs similarly or better.},
  month_numeric = {9}
}
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Year 2026
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Control, Barrier, Function, Speed, Fixed, Line, Transit, Headway, Management, 2026, Gunter, Talusan, Freudberg, Dubey, Laszka