Agent-based control strategies for smart and safe vehicles

Abstract

Summary form only given. The history of agent research with transportation problems should be richer and better in the future, and should go further from air to surface and vehicles to houses. As a matter of fact, the domain of traffic and transportation management is well suited to an agent-based approach because of it geographically distributed nature and its periodically busy-idle operating characteristics. The future of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) should full of intelligent and autonomous agents that travel among traffic control centers, road intersections, highways, streets, vehicles, houses, offices, malls, via Internet, wireless, and ad hoc networks, collect right information at right times and make smart decisions so that our transportation systems would be eventually "intelligent". Recently, more studies have emerged on applying agent-based approaches for intelligent vehicle problems. For example, agents for implementing a future car pooling, transportation scheduling, distributed control, traffic simulation, and so on. Although those are important problems in transportation, they are not systematically dealing with core issues in ITS yet. The purpose of this paper to introduce the concept of agent-based control (ABC) for networked systems in control theory (Fei-Yue Wang and Cheng-Hong Wang, 2003) to traffic and transportation managements, especially for smart and safe intelligent vehicles that are wireless connected, and to call for more and further research and applications of agent-based approach for ITS.