1A Decentralized Approach for Anticipatory Vehicle Routing using Delegate Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract—Advanced vehicle guidance systems use real-time traffic information for routing traffic and avoiding congestion. Unfortunately, these systems are only able to react upon the presence of traffic jams, not to prevent the creation of unneces-sary congestion. Anticipatory vehicle routing is promising in that respect, since this allows directing vehicle routing by accounting for traffic forecast information. This paper presents a decentralised approach for anticipa-tory vehicle routing that is particularly useful in large-scale dynamic environments. The approach is based on ‘delegate MAS’, an environment-centric coordination mechanism that is in part inspired by ant behaviour. Ant-like agents explore the environment on behalf of vehicles and detect congestion forecast, allowing vehicle to reroute. The approach is explained in depth, and evaluated by comparison against three alternative routing strategies. The experiments are done in simulation of a real-world traffic environment. The experiments indicate a considerable performance gain compared to the most advanced strategy under test, that is a TMC-based routing strategy. I