A cooperative multi-agent transportation management and route guidance system

Developing real-time approaches to manage roadway network congestion over time and space is a difficult problem. While many approaches to solving networking problems have been posed, the roadway routing problem is fundamentally different in that route choice behavior rests solely with the flow entities (drivers). The challenge is to find and implement solutions that achieve an efficient reallocation of network capacity. over time and space without seriously violating any individual user's preferences for mode, routing, departure, and/or arrival time. This paper proposes a solution approach based on cooperative multi-agent-based principled negotiation between agents that represent network managers, information service providers, and drivers equipped with route guidance systems. It is demonstrated that the cooperative, multi-agent approach is a natural extension of the National ITS Architecture. Furthermore, the approach is highly scalable and adaptable to a variety of networks and user populations. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.