Structural Observability of Multi-Lane Traffic with Connected Vehicles

We establish sufficient and necessary conditions for the (weak) structural observability as well as the strong structural observability of lane-based highway traffic. Based on these results, we characterize the fixed detector configurations that guarantee the proper operation of a proposed traffic state estimation scheme. The structural observability analyses are based on a data-driven model, which is introduced for the perlane traffic density dynamics. The proposed model is derived from the well-known conservation law equation via utilization of position and speed information from connected vehicle reports.