Multiagent traffic management: a reservationbased intersection control mechanism

Traffic congestion is one of the leading causes of lost productivity and decreased standard of living in urban set-tings. Recent advances in artificial intelligence suggest ve-hicle navigation by autonomous agents will be possible in the near future. In this paper, we propose a reservation-based system for alleviating traffic congestion, specifically at intersections, and under the assumption that the cars are controlled by agents. First, we describe a custom simulator that we have created to measure the different delays asso-ciated with conducting traffic through an intersection. Sec-ond, we specify a precise metric for evaluating the qual-ity of traffic control at an intersection. Using this simulator and this metric, we show that our reservation-based system can perform two to three hundred times better than traf-fic lights. As a result, it can smoothly handle much heavier traffic conditions. We show that our system very closely ap-proximates an overpass, which is the optimal solution for the problem with which we are dealing. 1