Test bed for multiagent control systems in road traffic management

In this paper we present a test bed for multiagent control systems in road traffic management. As the complexity of traffic control on a network grows it becomes more difficult to coordinate the actions of the large number of heterogeneous traffic management instruments that are available in the network. One way of handling this complexity is to divide the coordination problem into smaller coherent subproblems that can be solved with a minimum of interaction. Multiagent systems can aid in the distribution of the problem (over the various agents that comprise the multiagent system) and facilitate the coordination of the activities of these agents when required. In the literature no consensus exists about the best configuration of the traffic managing multiagent system and how the activities of the agents that comprise the multiagent system should be coordinated. The decomposition of a problem into various subproblems is an active field of research in the world of distributed artificial intelligence. This paper starts out with a survey of the approaches as they are reported in the literature. Subsequently the test bed is introduced and the modules it is comprised of. Finally an application is presented that illustrates some of the research the test bed has made possible.