Traffic Control of the Future 339
petra13 writes "A high point of the Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems conference this past week was Kurt Dresner and Peter Stone's paper 'Multiagent Traffic Management: A Reservation-Based Intersection Control Mechanism.' They designed an automated system where cars reserve a time to pass through an intersection as they approach it and are then sped up or slowed down to ensure their arrival at exactly the right time. This allows traffic to enter the intersection from all directions simultaneously, eliminating the need for traffic lights and considerably reducing delays caused by stopping traffic. On their website, you can find Java applet simulations to illustrate the system. Especially impressive looking is the six lanes of heavy traffic in all directions simulation. I would love to see this in real life (from a safe distance of course)."
Re:Scary! (Score:2, Informative)
An alternative mechanism (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Scary! (Score:2, Informative)
They may well have done so, just by making the 'length' of the cars longer. You could probably make a similar simulation with a minimum radius around each car, so nobody can be in your 'bubble'; maybe have a maximum number of cars in the intersection at a time. The obvious price is, longer delay. I could live with a 1.5 second 'delay' as opposed to 9.whatever seconds with traffic lights. There's negligible difference between a 1 second delay and 0.076 seconds anyway.
Chicken and egg... (Score:4, Informative)
Such proof for this system will require that ALL cars in the area be equipped with such systems and an equally large number of intersections handled.
This roadblock to development was what happened to a demo for a system in which cars controlled by computers would follow magnets in a road and drive within 1m of other cars. That was a couple of years back in San Diego.
If cars are going to be automated someday, we'll need to find some compromise which does not require implementation for all vehicles on a road- i.e. a lane for truckers on long stretches of highway.
That's just my 2 cents. Something like this would be really cool should we ever get to this point....or we could just get flying cars and fly over
Custom sim shows it better (Score:5, Informative)
N: 2 -
E: 4 - 1
S: 2 -
W: 4 - 0.1
you can see the system cue the cars on the east -> west road up and create little 'gaps' in the flow across all lanes that sync up with the north/south cars as they cross, nice to look at but it really needs turning and lane crossing, on the low granularity the cars get more clearence which is abit more realistic
perhaps not as ambitious, but. . . (Score:3, Informative)
In a bunch of cities in Canada, they have a bunch of "If this light is blinking, prepare to stop" lights. Tends to help the traffic flow and mood of the drivers quite a bit.
Re:What about..... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What about..... (Score:3, Informative)
good point: Re: Nobody turns... (Score:3, Informative)
No one turns. In addition to safety concerns, dogs, breakdowns, drunk drivers, etc, you hit on something another AC pointed out above (he's at 0, someone mod him up?) that "highways don't have intersections, eh". Really I think this is more applicable to a situation with all-computer control, not really partial or total human control.
Hypothetically, lets say that turning just boils down to scheduling a longer interval in the area where you turn at. So more cars slow down for someone to turn than just cars zipping through. I think the demo was maybe going for "wow" effect.. i think we probably mostly think this would result in accidents. Presuming it is intended for extensive application, I think we are talking about an "autodrive" system with people as passengers not pilots.
dystopian police state arrests passengers in their own cars, free reg required, news at 11, blah blah blah
I guess it would cost a lot to install this on a large scale and in every car, so NoYes19, I guess I would agree with you that better road design may be more agreeable short term.
Maybe long term, if shipping, mail and passenger transport becomes highly integrated, our roads will become more like a well run train system, and (at least in heavy traffic or high speed long haul situations) we drivers will sit back and sleep until Brooklyn. :)
One other comment, did you watch the simulation for a minute... the cars together tend to take up diagonal line formations. I'm thinking of a 4way with a stop sign or a roundabout as similar to ethernet as this simulation is to ATM (where time is scheduled ahead of transmission) and it got me thinking, what if the cars grouped together in steady patterns instead of (what appears to me to be) an emergent pattern of diagnonal lines (or is that on purpose?) mixed with apparently random scattering of cars through each other? BTW, props to the researchers.
preview? ..bah
Re:good point: Re: Nobody turns... (Score:2, Informative)