Distributed motion coordination with Co-Fields: a case study in urban traffic management

Coordinating the activities of distributed autonomous entities challenges traditional approaches to distributed coordination and calls for new paradigms and supporting middleware. This paper focuses on the problem of orchestrating the movements of mobile autonomous agents in a large-scale distributed systems, and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from physics. Our idea is to have the movements of agents driven by force fields, generated by the agents themselves and propagated via some infrastructure. A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in the agent's movements can then emerge due to the interrelated effects of agents following the shape of the fields and dynamic fields re-shaping. The approach is presented and its effectiveness described with regard to a concrete case study in the area of urban traffic coordination.