Agent-Based Approach for Connected Vehicles and Smart Road Signs Collaboration

Abstract

Road traffic is drastically increasing in big cities around the world. In order to enable a flexible management of this traffic, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) solutions are relying on emergent ubiquitous, mobile, and communication technologies, particularly to intelligently deal with the limited capacities of the existing road infrastructures. While intelligence is left to the autonomous and connected vehicles as well as to the ITS, the road infrastructure has been mostly playing a passive role (as a source of data). Road signage, in particular, are in best cases dynamic but do not play an active role in monitoring traffic and incidents. We propose in this paper to build Smart Road Signs (SRS) that can collaborate with Connected Vehicles in order to monitor traffic and warn drivers about any incident or danger. Our SRSs are meant to operate autonomously in order to detect road traffic problems, share appropriate information with vehicles in the vicinity, and display relevant messages based on the ongoing contextual situation. To meet our goals, we rely on Multi-Agent Systems to design SRSs as proactive components in the ITS landscape. We also rely on agent mobility in order to strengthen the collaboration with the connected vehicles.