An Intersection-Centric Auction-Based Traffic Signal Control Framework

Abstract

Vehicular traffic on urban road networks is of great interest to those who monitor air quality. Combustion emissions from transport vehicles are a major contributor of air pollution. More specifically, the release of fine particulate matter which has been linked to premature deaths. Travel and idle time are two factors that influence the amount of pollution generated by traffic. Reducing idle and travel times would have a positive impact on air quality. Thus, it is increasingly crucial to manage intersections effectively, particularly in congested cities and across a range of different types of traffic conditions. A variety of market-based multi-agent traffic management mechanisms have been proposed to improve traffic flow. In many of these systems drivers "pay" to gain access to favourable road ways (e.g., minimise travel time). A major obstacle in adopting many of these mechanisms is that the necessary communication infrastructure does not yet exist. They rely on vehicle-toinfrastructure and/or vehicle-to-vehicle communications. In this work, we propose a market-based mechanism which relies on existing technology (and in some places this technology is already in use). Experimental results show that our market-based approach is better at reducing idle and travel times as compared to fixed-time signal controllers.

Cultural Evolution of Sustainable Behaviors: Pro-environmental Tipping Points in an Agent-Based Model

“…ABMs have previously been employed in studying the adoption of various sustainable behaviors and attitudes, 19 including models of norm transmission and evolution, 20,21 recycling, 22 traffic and transport, [23][24][25] farming, 26 energy and risk management, 27,28 and psychology. 29,30 Our contribution to this rapidly developing field is in developing a holistic systemic approach to the emergence of behavior as a subtle function of social, individual, and environmental factors by focusing explicitly on the emergent leverage points and tipping points.…”

Exploiting Traffic Light Coordination and Auctions for Intersection and Emergency Vehicle Management in a Smart City Mixed Scenario

“…On the other hand, in [19], which is a foundational paper in vehicle coordination, the authors proposed a method for coordinating both autonomous and human-powered vehicles through traffic lights considering a First Come-First Served policy. A different approach was presented in [20,21], in which two traffic lights competed with each other to reach the highest value of green time. In [2,9], the authors proposed and evaluated how to exploit traffic lights through auction systems for improved traffic management at intersections.…”

Comparative Analysis of Economic Instruments in Intersection Operation: A User-Based Perspective

“…In the case of a direct transaction game, there is a nonnegative net personal benefit to vehicle A whether they win or lose. The net personal benefit is given by (8) and the expected personal benefit is…”