On the possibility of Priority-Based Road Traffic Control

In this paper, we propose a priority-based road traffic control (PBC). PBC is a sort of multi-agent system, assuming autonomous vehicles as agents, in which road traffic should be controlled through interactions between the intelligent car agents. PBC protocol is the common protocol through which the car agents negotiate their priorities when their driving lines mutually interfere, in order to determine the order of crossing a given intersection. We applied genetic programming to evolve the dynamic formula of setting the priorities so that the PBC protocol allows for adaptive and efficient road traffic control even without traffic signals. The conducted simulations verify the efficiency of the proposed PBC, and compared the latter with some other methods. We generalize that the proposed PBC is quite efficient in that it improves the road traffic in an intersection even without the need of traffic signals.