A study on social diffusive impacts of a novel car-navigation-system sharing individual information in Urban traffic systems

As one of the authors´ trials to establish a model for human-environment-social systems, a multi-agent simulation model to deal with urban traffic congestion problems involving automobiles embedded with several strategies of car navigation systems (CNS), has been presented. A shortest time route with route information sharing strategy (ST-RIS) is believed to be one of the solutions for a novel CNS based on bilateral information shared among automobile agents. The question of which strategy is most appropriate for solving urban traffic congestion can be seen as a social dilemma, since the social holistic utility is opposite to each agent´s individual utility. The presented model shows that this social dilemma is observed as a typical chicken type dilemma, or as a typical minority game, where an agent who has adopted a minority strategy can earn more utility than other strategies. Consequently, the model has illustrated that ST-pRIS, which is a further advanced strategic form of ST-RIS, where only partial information is shared among agents, has a moderate potential to be diffused in a society from the viewpoint of the evolutionary game theory.