Intelligent Control in Networks: The Case of Road Traffic Management

This paper illustrates intelligent control in complex networks by the example of road traffic management. An important goal in road traffic management, which as yet has been achieved only very partially, is to make the move from local traffic management to network level traffic management. The approach to this goal described here is a combination of top-down control and several bottom-up control mechanisms: top-down control consists of off-line preparation of control scenario's that apply to certain traffic patterns. The bottom-up mechanisms rely on emergent behavior of multi-agent systems: one set of agents is formed by the vehicles, a second set is formed by the nodes and links of the road network. The approach can to a certain extent be generalized to other types of complex networks.