A Computational Market for Distributed Control of Urban Road Traffic Systems

In the last decade, economic approaches based on computational markets have been proposed as a paradigm for the design and control of complex sociotechnical systems, such as urban road traffic systems. The control problem of an urban road traffic system can be modeled as a distributed resource-allocation problem to apply market-based techniques as solution methods. In this paper, we design a competitive computational market, where driver agents trade the use of the capacity inside the intersections with intersection manager agents. We show how the market dynamics influence the drivers´ behavior, leading to a more efficient use of the urban road traffic system, in terms of lower average travel times and less congestion.