A Dynamic Network Simulation Model Based on Multi-Agent Systems

This paper reports on how the abstraction approach of multi-agent systems can be used to represent the complexity inherent in the urban traffic domain, accounting for the importance of modelling travellers’ behaviour and their interaction with intelligent transportation technologies. A key premise in the approach proposed is the identification of what we have coined autonomous decision entities (ADE) that is defined as an agent shell to structure the way agents can be implemented and inserted in the environment. Such a structure is very flexible in the sense it is only defined in meta-level, comprising sensors, effectors and a reasoning kernel. The conceptual multi-agent model is presented and implemented within the DRACULA simulation suite, which is used for simulation experiments on the analysis of drivers’ route and departure time choice.