An Organic Computing Approach to Resilient Traffic Management

Growing cities and the increasing number of vehicles per inhabitant lead to a higher volume of traffic in urban road networks. As space is limited and the extension of existing road infrastructure is expensive, the construction of new roads is not always an option. Therefore, it is necessary to optimise the urban road network to reduce the negative effects of traffic, for example, pollution emission and fuel consumption. Urban road networks are characterised by their large number of signalised intersections. Until now, the optimisation of these signalisations is mostly done manually through traffic engineers. As urban traffic demands tend to change constantly, it is almost impossible to foresee all runtime situations at design time. Hence, an approach is needed that is able to react adaptively at runtime to optimise signalisations of intersections according to the monitored situation. The resilient traffic management system offers a decentralised approach with communicating intersections, which are able to adapt their signalisation dynamically at runtime and establish progressive signal systems (PSS) to optimise traffic flows and the number of stops per vehicle.