Congestion-Aware Multi-Agent Path Planning: Distributed Algorithm and Applications

Congestion-aware route selection in automatic evacuation guiding based on cooperation between evacuees and their mobile nodes

“…There have also been studied on congestion alleviation in general road networks [12][13][14]. Verroios and Kollias propose a congestion-aware route selection method for vehicles, with the help of a ad hoc network [12].…”

“…It also shares the estimated traveling time to each segment with other vehicles and dynamically determines a route to its destination based on the information. Lim and Rus propose a probabilistic route selection method to realize user equilibrium (Nash equilibrium) and social optimum in game theory [13].…”

“…There are some kinds of congestion models: a model using cellular automata [6,7], a model based on the function of traffic volume on each road [9,13], and a model where moving speed depends o the density of moving objects on each road [4,15]. In this paper, we propose a congestion model by extending the moving-speed based congestion model [4].…”

“…The sharing methods of congestion information can be classified in terms of network architectures. Lim and Rus assume that global information sharing among mobile agents can be achieved by communication infrastructures [13]. There are some studies that assume local information sharing can be achieved by ad hoc networks [6,12] and DTNs [2,7].…”

“…In general, such individually rational decisions of evacuees cannot necessarily result in the social optimum, where the average evacuation time among evacuees is minimized. Lim and Rus reveal which utility function to determine the route of each mobile agent results in the social optimum [13]. Note that they assume that the global information sharing among mobile agents can be achieved as mentioned above.…”