A multi-agent system for managing adverse weather situations on the road network

Abstract

The development of traffic management and control strategies to improve traffic flows and road safety is necessary due to the high dynamism of traffic flows. The use of distributed intelligent systems can help the traffic organizations and the road operators to cope with possible incidents on the road network, especially when the incidents are related to adverse meteorological conditions. In that case, the probability of road accidents is increased due to the difficulty of driving under bad weather conditions. So, if the operators detect any meteorological incident, they must decide how to deal with it in order to improve traffic safety. In this paper we introduce a new multiagent system (MAS) to support traffic management when there appear meteorological problems in the road network. MAS technology helps to deal with the specific characteristics of traffic domain. The proposed MAS is able to work in two ways: a) coordinately, where all the agents work to solve weather problems in large networks and b) locally, where due to communications breakdown small groups of agents work together to inform road users about weather problems. The MAS has a rule-based system to deal with the meteorological data and decide the actions to take in front of any meteorological issue. This expert system also controls the quality of the data, improving the road operator confidence in the decisions taken by the expert system. However, weather sensors can provide wrong data, due to several factors (hardware failure, climate factors, etc.) so the rule based system controls these provided data by applying specific coherence and correlation rules to improve the quality of the taken decisions.