A test bed for multi-agent control systems in road traffic management

Reference:
R.T. van Katwijk, P. van Koningsbruggen, B. De Schutter, and J. Hellendoorn, "A test bed for multi-agent control systems in road traffic management," Proceedings of the 8th TRAIL Congress 2004 - A World of Transport, Infrastructure and Logistics - Selected Papers (P.H.L. Bovy, ed.), Rotterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 309-329, Nov. 2004.

Abstract:
As the complexity of traffic control on a network grows it becomes more difficult to coordinate the actions of the large number of traffic management instruments that are available in the network. One way of handling this complexity is to divide the coordination problem into smaller coherent subproblems that can be solved with a minimum of interaction. The decomposition of a problem into various subproblems is an active field of research in the world of distributed artificial intelligence. In this paper we present a test bed for multi-agent control systems in traffic management. In literature no consensus exists about the best configuration of the traffic managing multi-agent system and how the activities of the agents should be coordinated. The system should be capable of managing different levels of complexity, a diversity of policy goals, and different forms of traffic problems. The test bed presented here aids in-depth research in this field.