Traffic Management

This program is a translation into NetLogo of an original Java simulator written by Kurt Dresner and described in

• Kurt Dresner and Peter Stone. Multiagent Traffic Management: A Reservation-Based Intersection Control Mechanism. In Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, p. 530--537, ACM. 2004. (see also Dresner's original applet)

The experiments for figures 6 to 8 can be carried out by changing the parameters accordingly and taking the results from the monitors on the right side of the screen.

Name: Benito Mendoza Garcia email: mendoza2@engr.sc.edu

SUMMARY

CSCE 782: Problem Set 1 Tuesday, 7 September 2004 Multiagent Traffic Management Simulation

This program is based on the paper [1] and consists of a simulator to model traffic at intersections and three different intersection control policies: overpass, traffic light, and reservation system. The program reproduces the results presented in the paper. It has four buttons, labeled Experiment1 through Experiment4, to perform the simulations that produce the results in Figures 2 - 5 of the paper respectively. Results from this experiments are shown in the plots and monitors placed on the right side of the screen. Because experiments take a very long time to run, it will take much time to reproduce the graphs in the figures of the paper. The experiments for figures 6 to 8 can be carried out by changing the parameters accordingly and taking the results from the monitors on the right side of the screen.

DIFFERENCES WITH THE PAPER

A difference with the simulator created by the authors of the paper and this one is that in the first one the cars have a rectangle shape (2 wide and 4 long) while in the second one they have a squared shape. The reason is that in NetLogo, although turtles onscreen can be represented with certain size and shape, they have a squared internal representation. The area of this simulator is (200 m X 200 m) as opposed to (400 m X 400 m) for the one from the paper. The reason is that an area of (400 X 400) was to big to fit on screen.

HOW TO USE IT

In this program, the user has the ability to control the following parameters (through sliders placed on the left side of the screen):

ticks-by-second: this is the number of ticks (timesteps) that form a second. In the paper this is equal to 50. model: the intersection control policy (Overpass, Traffic Light, or Reservation System) lanes: the number of lanes that will be created for each direction (north, south, east, and west) spawn-probability-N: the probability for spawning a car in the north direction spawn-probability-S: the probability for spawning a car in the north direction spawn-probability-E: the probability for spawning a car in the east direction spawn-probability-W: the probability for spawning a car in the west direction period: the period of the traffic light alpha: the fraction of the light�s period that the light spends on green in one direction beta: the fraction of the light�s period that the light spends on red in al the four directions granularity: the number of rows and columns that the intersection is divided into when using the Reservation System model (the intersection is divided into a [granularity x granularity] grid of reservation tiles)

The size of the cars and the lane width can be changed by modifying the cars-size and lane-width global variables respectively.

Some plots and monitors are placed on the right side of the screen. The monitors show information such as average delay, expected average delay, maximum delay, expected maximum delay, time step (clock), number of finished cars. The plots show the results obtained from the experiments (buttons Experiment1 through Experiment4).

REFERENCES [1] Kurt Dresner and Peter Stone. �Multiagent Traffic Management: A Reservation-Based Intersection Control Mechanism�. In Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, p. 530--537, ACM. 2004