An Intelligent Traffic System (ITS) involves a much closer interaction between all of its components: drivers, pedestrians, public transportation and traffic management systems. Adaptive signal systems, driver advisory and route planning and automated vehicles are some of the goals set up to increase the efficiency of actual systems.

We are developing a decentralized architecture for city traffic control where intersections are port-based agents. A self-adaptive system would be able to respond quickly to the changes in the road conditions, modifying signal policies and rerouting drivers to prevent congestions. Research issues include distributed control architecture and optimization, inter-agent communication and driver models. Different traffic simulators are being used together with the port-based agent architecture, Artist (Bosch GmbH), ShiftAHS and CorSim.

Example of an Intelligent Traffic Service: A preferred vehicle like a bus may be located and identified on the road. With that information, the corresponding traffic controllers may be changed accordingly to give priority to the bus route.

Currently, we are developing two applications:

Analysis of the traffic patterns in a section of the city of Pittsburgh called East-Liberty.

Penn-Circle, East Liberty map.

Study of the use of real-time inter-vehicle communication in Telematics. This study is sponsored by Bosch-RTC, Pittsburgh.