Multiagent Traffic Management:
A Reservation-Based Intersection
Control Mechanism
Kurt Dresner and Peter Stone
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This page is intended to supplement papers submitted for review to
workshops, conferences, and journals. Current papers include:
We have proposed a reservation-based system for alleviating
traffic congestion, specifically at intersections. As part of this
endeavor, we created a custom simulator to model traffic at
intersections. We created a Java applet version of the simulator so
that the simulator could be viewed through a web browser. To view the
applet, you will need the Java Plug-in.
The main result of our work can be summarized with the following
three simulations. To run them, click on the links below. When the
applet finishes loading, select "Run" from the "Simulator" menu.
- Traffic Light - cars must obey the
traffic signals. Using this system, cars are delayed by an average of
9.45 seconds relative to how quickly they could travel
without an intersection present.The traffic light has these parameters:
- Period: 30 seconds
- Alpha (fraction of period the light is green in the East/West
direction): .45
- Beta (fraction of period the light is red in all directions between
greens): .05
- Reservation System
- cars can reserve time slots in the intersection. The granularity of
the reservation system for this simulation is 4 (i.e. the system
consists of a 4 x 4 grid of reservation tiles). Using this system,
cars are delayed an average of 0.076 seconds -
significantly less than when using a traffic light.
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Overpass - cars are always allowed to go and
can pass through each other when travelling in different directions, as
if there were an overpass in place. This system represents a
theoretical lower bound: 0 seconds delay.
All of the above simulations are run with the following parameters:
- Car spawning probability for each direction: .01
- Number of lanes for each direction: 2
- Size of simulation: 400 x 400
You can also run the simulator with custom
parameters.
Taking the approach to an extreme, you can see what the reservation
system enables with 6 lanes in each
direction and granularity of 48.
Copyright 2004, Kurt Dresner. This simulation is for
demonstration purposes only. It is not to be used for any other
purpose without express consent.
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