  Human drivers may behave in an imprecise/unstable manner, leading to traffic
oscillations which are harmful to traffic throughput. Recent field experiments
have shown that the control of a single autonomous vehicle (AV) can increase
traffic throughput on a circular test track, as well as reduce traffic
oscillations on straight roads. We consider a mixed traffic environment
consisting of humans and autonomous vehicles, where the goal is to find a
control policy for the autonomous vehicles which maximizes traffic throughput
by preventing oscillations in speed. We formulate this problem as an
optimization problem which can be solved using gradient based optimization.
Numerical experiments on a circular road show that the optimized control policy
improves traffic throughput by 28%.
