Automated negotiation for traffic regulation

Abstract

Urban congestion is a major problem in our society for quality of life and for productivity. The increasing communication abilities of vehicles and recent advances in artificial intelligence allow new solutions to be considered for traffic regulation, based on real-time information and distributed cooperative decision-making models. The paper presents a mechanism allowing a distributed regulation of the right-of-way of the vehicles at an intersection. The decision-making relies on an automatic negotiation between vehicles equipped with communication devices, taking into account the travel context and the constraints of each vehicle. During this negotiation, the vehicles exchange arguments, in order to take into account various types of information, on individual and network scales. Our mechanism deals with the continuous aspect of the traffic flow and performs a real-time regulation.