Multi-agent dynamic traffic management for safeguarding traffic throughput and/or environmental and safety qualities

Abstract

Increasingly traffic management measures exhibit dynamic features, thus taking into account dynamics in the traffic demand pattern or transport system supply pattern. Some examples are demand actuated traffic signal settings or variable message signs. In most cases these measures are functioning as stand alone systems. This means that there is no or hardly any coordination between the various measures. This lack of coordination could make the application of dynamic traffic management measures less effective: e.g. the measures could serve opposite objectives or even generate a negative impact on traffic flows that are not in any way related to the problem. Consequently the un-coordinated application of dynamic traffic management measures can be very counter-productive. To avoid these setbacks it will be necessary to be able to control the traffic in two ways: in a detailed way by focusing on the problem(s) that need(s) to be solved (distributed control), and in a more generic way by controlling the overall traffic performance in the network (generic control)