Traffic congestion is one of the leading causes of lost productivity and decreased standard of living in urban settings. Recent advances in artificial intelligence suggest vehicle navigation by autonomous agents will be possible in the near future. In previous work, a reservation-based system for alleviating traffic congestion, specifically at intersections was proposed. This paper extends that prototype implementation in several ways with the aim of making it more implementable in the real world. In particular, we 1) add the ability of vehicles to turn, 2) enable them to accelerate while in the intersection, and 3) augment their interaction capabilities with a detailed protocol such that the vehicles do not need to know anything about the intersection control policy. The use of this protocol limits the interaction of the driver agent and the intersection manager to the extent that it is a reasonable approximation of reliable wireless communication. Finally, we describe how different intersection control policies can be expressed with this protocol and limited exchange of information. All three improvements are fully implemented and tested, and we present detailed empirical results validating their effectiveness.

PDF, PS, HTML

In Frank Dignum and Virginia Dignum and Sven Koenig and Sarit Kraus and Munindar P. Singh and Michael Wooldridge, editors, The Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, New York, NY, July 2005. ACM Press.

@InProceedings{AAMAS05-intersection, title={Multiagent Traffic Management: An Improved Intersection Control Mechanism}, author={Kurt Dresner and Peter Stone}, booktitle={The Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems}, month={July}, editor={Frank Dignum and Virginia Dignum and Sven Koenig and Sarit Kraus and Munindar P. Singh and Michael Wooldridge}, address={New York, NY}, publisher={ACM Press}, url="http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?AAMAS05-intersection", year={2005} }