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From Goods to Traffic: First Steps Toward an Auction-Based Traffic Signal Controller

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Advances in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Sustainability: The PAAMS Collection (PAAMS 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9086))

Abstract

Traffic congestion is a major issue that plagues many urban road networks large and small. Traffic engineers are now leaning towards Intelligent Traffic Systems as many types of physical changes to road networks are costly or infeasible. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have become a popular paradigm for exploring intelligent solutions to traffic management problems. There are many MAS approaches to traffic management that utilise market mechanisms. In market-based approaches, drivers “pay” to use the roadways. However, a major issue with many of these solutions is that they require technology that, as yet, does not exist or is not widely available. For example, they rely on a special software agent that resides within the vehicle. This “vehicle agent” is responsible for participating in the market mechanism and communicating with the transportation infrastructure. In this paper, an auction-based traffic controller is proposed which exploits all the benefits of market mechanisms without the need for a vehicle agent. Experimental results show that such a controller is better at reducing delay and increasing throughput in a simulated city, as compared to fixed-time signal controllers.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Jeffery Raphael & Elizabeth Sklar

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Simon Maskell

Authors
  1. Jeffery Raphael
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  2. Simon Maskell
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  3. Elizabeth Sklar
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jeffery Raphael .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Grenoble, France

    Yves Demazeau

  2. University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, USA

    Keith S. Decker

  3. Universidad Politécnica, Madrid, Spain

    Javier Bajo Pérez

  4. Department of Computing Science, Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

    Fernando de la Prieta

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Raphael, J., Maskell, S., Sklar, E. (2015). From Goods to Traffic: First Steps Toward an Auction-Based Traffic Signal Controller. In: Demazeau, Y., Decker, K., Bajo Pérez, J., de la Prieta, F. (eds) Advances in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Sustainability: The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9086. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18944-4_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18944-4_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-18943-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-18944-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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