A Framework for Enhancing the Operational Phase of Traffic Management Plans

Road traffic emergencies are dangerous and unexpected situations that require immediate actions by the authorities. These actions involve to attend to the people who have been affected by the emergency and to minimize its consequences. A Traffic Management Plan (TMP) is a set of pre-defined measures and actions designed to produce an effective and efficient use of available resources in order to deal with a specific road incident. The operational phase of a TMP involves the coordination of several independent agencies (road managers, traffic police, firemen, etc.). These agencies must provide the resources required by the TMP in the deployment of the measures and actions. In this paper, a new framework to support the TMP operational phase is presented. This framework models each agency as an intelligent agent and it uses a reverse combinatorial distributed auction as the core component of a negotiation process. The goal of this negotiation process is to obtain a common agreement on the best possible allocation of resources taking into account the role, competencies and interest of the involved agencies. The framework has been implemented in a real scenario with real data. The tests developed have demonstrated that the system is able to manage the resources in terms of the execution time and the quality of the provided solutions.