Bimodal traffic regulation system: A multi-agent approach

The development of surface public transportation networks is a major issue in terms of ecology, economy and society. Their quality in term of punctuality and passengers services (regularity between buses) should be improved in order to improve their attractiveness. To do so, cities often use regulation systems at intersections that grant priority to buses. The problem is that each transportation mode has its own characteristics and a dedicated decision support system. Therefore, most of them hardly take into account both public transport vehicles such as buses and private vehicle traffic. This paper proposes a multi-agent model that supports bimodal regulation and preserves monomodal regulation. The objective is to improve global traffic, to reduce bus delays and to improve bus regularity in congested areas of the network. In our approach, traffic regulation is obtained thanks to communication, collaboration and negotiation between heterogeneous agents. We tested our strategy on a complex network of nine junctions. The results of the simulation are presented.