Using cooperative mediation to coordinate traffic lights: a case study

ABSTRACT

Several approaches tackle the problem of reducing traffic jams. A class of these approaches deals with coordination of traffic lights in order to allow vehicles traveling in a given direction to pass an arterial without stopping at junctions. In short, classical approaches, which are mostly based on offline and centralized determination of the prioritized direction, are quite inflexible since they cannot cope with dynamic changes in the traffic volume. More flexible approaches have been proposed based on implicit coordination and implicit communication (e.g. derived from game theory and swarm intelligence). These have advantages as well as shortcomings. The present paper presents an approach based on cooperative mediation which is a compromise between totally autonomous coordination with implicit communication and the classical centralized solution. We use a distributed constraint optimization algorithm in a dynamic scenario, showing that the mediation is able to reduce the frequency of miscoordination.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence

General Terms:
Algorithms

Keywords:
constraint optimization problems, coordination, traffic control