Towards application of automated planning in urban traffic control

Advanced urban traffic control systems are often based on feed-back algorithms. For instance, current traffic control systems often operate on the basis of adaptive green phases and flexible co-ordination in road (sub) networks based on measured traffic conditions. However, these approaches are still not very efficient during unforeseen situations such as road incidents when changes in traffic are requested in a short time interval. Therefore, we need self-managing systems that can plan and act effectively in order to restore an unexpected road traffic situations into the normal order. A significant step towards this is exploiting Automated Planning techniques which can reason about unforeseen situations in the road network and come up with plans (sequences of actions) achieving a desired traffic situation. In this paper, we introduce the problem of self-management of a road traffic network as a temporal planning problem in order to effectively navigate cars throughout a road network. We demonstrate the feasibility of such a concept and discuss our preliminary evaluation in order to identify strengths and weaknesses of our approach and point to some promising directions of future research.