Personal rapid transit in open control framework

Since last decade, the use of safe, comfortable and ecologic vehicles to operate in urban context as an alternative to private car has been required by authorities. Several projects have emerged on on-demand transport with new automated vehicles known as Cybercars or PRTs. In the context of intelligent transportation, where vehicles can be seen as autonomous and decisional entities composing a self-organized system to be controlled, this paper presents the open-control paradigm and gives an example of its instantiation with stigmergic scheme. The open-control concept, developed in our Lab (LAMIH), exhibits the classic explicit control, as well as an innovative type of control called implicit control. The implicit control allows system entities to be influenced via an Optimization Mechanism (OM). After introducing the open-control paradigm, we illustrate one possible implementation based upon a stigmergic approach and applied to a PRTs network. Implementation architecture and first experimental results are reported.