A Preliminary Study on Anticipatory Stigmergy for Traffic Management

In this paper, we propose an anticipatory stigmergy model for decentralized traffic congestion management. Managing traffic congestion is one of the main issues for smart cities, and many works have been trying to address it from the IT and Transportation research perspectives. Recently, dynamic coordination methods are becoming possible using the more short-term traffic information that can be provided by probe-vehicle information or smart phones. Some approaches have been trying to handle short-term traffic information in which a stigmergy-based approach is employed as an indirect communication method for cooperation among distributed agents and for managing traffic congestion. One drawback of these approaches is that handling near-future congestion remains problematic because stigmergies are essentially based on past information. In this paper, we propose anticipatory stigmergy for sharing information on near-future traffic and allocating drivers adequately. In this model, all vehicles submit their near-future intention as anticipatory stigmergy to research their routes. Our preliminary results demonstrate that anticipatory stigmergy with allocation strategy works well.