Don't Go With the Ant Flow: Ant-Inspired Traffic Routing in Urban Environments

Traffic routing is a well established optimization problem in traffic management. We address here dynamic routing problems where the load of roads is taken into account dynamically, aiming at the optimization of required travel times. We investigate ant-based algorithms that can handle dynamic routing problems, but suffer from negative emergent effects like road congestions. We propose an inverse antbased routing algorithm to avoid these negative emergent effects. We evaluate our approach with the agent-based traffic simulation system MAINSIM. For evaluation, we use a synthetic and two real world scenarios. Evaluation results indicate that the proposed inverse ant-based routing can lead to a reduction of travel time.