Decentralized Adaptive Agents for Control of Traffic Signals

Vikram Manikonda, Anna Teittinen, and David Lovell

Proceedings of the International Congress on Intelligent Systems and Applications, Sydney, Australia, December, 2000.

ABSTRACT

In this paper we discuss the design and implementation details of DAARTS, a novel agent-based controller for decentralized adaptive control of traffic signals in an urban traffic network. DAARTS adopts a hierarchical multi agent-based architecture where the lowest level (intersection agents) involves individual intersection-traffic dynamics and phase selection based on "local" information, while higher levels take into account the supervisory (network-level) dynamics. Coordination between intersections is achieved in a decentralized manner at the lowest level. The decentralized control strategy is implemented in Cybele, a multi agent infrastructure that allows for distributed computing and inter-agent commuication, hence allowing us to emulate real-traffic controllers at individual intersections of a network. DSTK, the DAARTS Simulation Toolkit, allows for easy integration of our agent controller with CORSIM for simulation, visualization and evaluation of the controller. Details on the design and implementation of DSTK are also presented in this paper.