Weighing communication overhead against travel time reduction in advanced traffic information systems

In this paper we develop a multi-agent based traffic simulator by considering traffic flows as emergent phenomena over two layered multi-agent systems. The first layer is composed of vehicle agents and the second layer is composed of signal agents. The system can naturally express actual road networks and can reproduce various traffic congestions induced by means of local interactions among vehicle agents. We show the system is useful for the road enhancing problem to guess the most suitable place when a new road is constructed. Further, we study a traffic control system which dissolves congestions at intersections by monitoring the traffic flow at the first layer.status: publishe