Nondeterministic cellular automaton for modelling urban traffic with self-organizing control

Abstract

Controlling flow in networks by means of decentralized strategies have gained a lot of attention in recent years. Typical advantages of such approach – efficiency, scalability, versatility, fault tolerance – make it an interesting alternative to more traditional, global optimization. In the paper it is shown how the continuous, macroscopic, self-organizing control proposed by Lämmer and Helbing [10] can be implemented in the discrete, nondeterministic cellular automaton (CA) model of urban traffic. Using various examples, it is demonstrated that the decentralized approach outperforms the best nonresponsive solution based on fixed cycles. In order to analyse relatively large parameter space, an HPC cluster has been used to run multiple versions of a serial CA simulator. The presented model can serve as a test bed for testing other optimization methods and vehicle routing algorithms realized with the use of CA.