Car Platoons Simulated as a Multiagent System

Collaborative driving is an important sub-component of Intelligent Transportation Systems ITS and it strives to create vehicles that are able to cooperate in order to navigate through urban traffic by using communications. In this paper, we address this issue by putting emphasis on the simulation of a platoon of cars considered as more or less autonomous software agents. To do that, we propose a hierarchical architecture based on three layers (guidance layer, management layer and traffic control layer) which can be used for simulating a centralized platoon (where a head vehicle-agent coordinates other vehicle-agents by applying its coordination rule) or a decentralized platoon (where the platoon is considered as a team of vehicle-agents trying to maintain the platoon). Such hierarchical architecture is sustained by a simulator that we describe in details. Finally we present our first results concerning the first step of our project and which only focuses on the first level (autonomous longitudinal control) where only the relative distance and speed of the cars are actively controlled.