A market-inspired approach to reservation-based urban road traffic management

Urban road traffic management is an example of a socially relevant problem that can be modelled as a large-scale, open, distributed system, composed of many autonomous interacting agents, which need to be controlled in a decentralized manner. Most models for urban road traffic management rely on control elements that act on traffic flows. Dresner and Stone have put forward the idea of an advanced urban road traffic infrastructure that allows for cars to individually reserve space and time at an intersection so as to be able to safely cross it. In this paper we extend Dresner and Stone’s approach to networks of intersections. For this purpose, we draw upon market-inspired control methods as a paradigm for urban road traffic management. We conceive the system as a computational economy, where driver agents trade with infrastructure agents in a virtual marketplace, purchasing reservations to cross intersections when commuting through the city. We show that in situations of similar traffic load, an increase of the infrastructure’s monetary benefit usually implies a decrease of the drivers’ average travel times.