Dynamic routing in traffic networks using AntNet

Abstract

Road traffic is getting busier and busier each year. Everyone is familiar with traffic congestion on highways and in the city. And everyone will admit that it is a problem that affects us both economically as well as mentally. Furthermore finding your way in an unknown city can be very difficult even with a map. Navigation systems like CARiN can help in such cases. These systems display the route to be followed when the user has set his destination. Most current systems are based on static information. The latest versions are also able to use congestion information to avoid trouble spots. But such information is only available for highways and not in a city. This paper addresses the dynamic routing of traffic in a city. We want to set up a routing system for motor vehicles that guides them through the city using the shortest way in time, taking into account the load on the roads. Furthermore we want the routing system to be distributed, for more robustness and load distribution. Applied in packet switched networks, the Ant-based algorithms have proven to be superior to other distributed routing algorithms. In this paper we will apply a variant of such an algorithm (AntNet), to a traffic network in a city. © 2004 Springer-Verlag.