Multiagent technology for an Urban Road Traffic Advisor

This paper proposes generic multi-agent system architecture for an urban driving advisory system. This architecture is described as composed of basic role-oriented processes communicating though primitive interaction protocols. The architecture is aimed to provide an enabling communications framework upon which multi-agent system models can be organized and built to be used for an simulation of an urban map and to estimate the traffic behavior (to provide information about the best routes). The paper presents a hierarchical routing strategy for an Urban Driving Advisory System (UDAS), based on agent technology. UDAS assists the drivers to get the desired destination taking into account the current situation of traffic characteristics. It gives the estimated arrival time and the corresponding distance between a start and an arrival point. The necessary information is obtained from traffic and records of previous traffic behavior (used as statistic information and to characterized the traffic, for ex. the traffic is jammed on an area if we have a street or an intersection blocked and the neighbor streets or intersections are full). The drivers could consult the advisory system using a variety of devices like mobile phones. The information given by the advisory system has the form of predefined short messages.