Multiagent Environments for Dynamic Transportation Applications

Abstract

Dynamic transportation applications have long been a domain of choice for the multiagent paradigm. Indeed, the presence of distributed entities, the highly dynamic character of these applications and the often presence of human actors in the system makes it very suitable for a multiagent design. This paper advocates for the primary consideration of multiagent environment design when dealing with such dynamic transportation applications. Transportation applications can greatly benefit from the use of the multiagent environment since most of them consider a dynamic geographical positioning of the system components. Indeed, the simultaneous consideration of the time and space dimensions makes the environment, which is shared and accessed by all the agents of the system, a candidate of choice to capture the dynamics of the application. The environment design can be envisioned at several levels of the system construction. It can be used as a medium for interaction between distributed entities. It could be used as a coordination entity of the system components. It can finally be designed as a mental model for the agents that they can use in their reasoning. We illustrate the possible uses of the environment with two transportation applications dealing with traveler information.