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ence with our paper is that they assume that they work
with autonomous vehicles, thus they do not necessar-
ily need to use traffic lights in an intersection. Also,
they do not use waiting time as the metric of interest,
but average delay and maximum delay. In (France and
Ghorbani, 2003) a multi-agent system is presented for
optimizing urban traffic not only in one intersection
but in several. They use a hierarchical organization
of agents, ranging from agents that control the light
patterns in one intersection to agents that coordinate
groups of intersections. The difference with this pa-
per is that they model the cars as a quantity trying
to minimize the traffic density from a global point of
view. In our work, we are centered on optimization of
independent intersections trying to minimize the car’s
average waiting time.
5 CONCLUSIONS
This paper presented a coordination mechanism for
multi-agent systems followed by traffic lights in a
simulated traffic intersection. The mechanism is
based on a conflict resolution strategy as it identifies
conflictive situations where the green time demanded
by traffic lights in an intersection is greater than the
cycle time of that intersection. The mechanism tries
to solve the conflict distributing the cycle time among
the traffic lights on the intersection. The mechanism
has been tested in a multi-agent based simulator, and
results show that it was able to reduce average car
waiting time in cases involving one, two and three
congested directions, at one and two independent in-
tersections. Under some assumptions we described,
the CD mechanism is emulating a negotiation process
that maximizes the summation of utilities.
Several improvements could be suggested to the
mechanism. Other methods, for example neural net-
works, could be proposed for improving the car ar-
rival rate measurement process. Also, more exper-
iments can be conducted increasing the number of
independent intersections, introducing diagonal lanes
for having more than four different directions, etc. Fi-
nally, coordination methods using the results provided
by the mechanism could be proposed for controlling
several intersections.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work has been done while Jose Luis Aguirre was
full time professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey,
and was supported by CAT145 Research Chair at the
same institution.
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