A Cooperative Distributed System for Real-Time Route Guidance

This paper describes a cooperative decentralized architecture for reactive real-time route guidance. The architecture is cooperative in the sense that it allows adjacent local controllers to exchange information regarding the traffic conditions in their territories. A set of local decision rules and associated heuristic functions to support the cooperative architecture are specified. A protocol governing the knowledge exchange among local adjacent controllers is developed. A simulation-assignment modeling framework is used for assessing the effectiveness of this cooperative architecture under various levels of controller knowledge and network traffic congestion. The cooperative decentralized system is tested under various scenarios of knowledge and cooperation and network traffic demand levels. The cooperative system is compared against the shortest path algorithm as a benchmark.