Holonic multi-agent system for traffic signals control

Agent-based technologies are rapidly growing as a powerful tool for modelling and developing large-scale distributed systems. Recently, multi-agent systems are largely used for intelligent transportation systems modelling. Traffic signals control is a challenging issue in this area, especially in a large-scale urban network. In a large traffic network, where each agent represents a traffic signals controller, there are many entities interacting with each other and hence it is a complex system. An approach to reduce the complexity of such systems is using organisation-based multi-agent system. In this paper, we use an organisation called holonic multi-agent system (HMAS) to model a large traffic network. A traffic network containing fifty intersections is partitioned into a number of regions and holons are assigned to control each region. The holons are hierarchically arranged in two levels, intersection controller holons in the first level and region controller holons in the second level. We introduce holonic Q-learning to control the signals in both levels. The inter-level interactions between the holons in the two levels contribute to the learning process. Experimental results show that the holonic Q-learning prevents the network to be over-saturated while it causes less average delay time and higher flow rate. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.