Self-Organizing Traffic Control for Congestion Avoidance and Traffic Flow Improvement

Social insects perform complex, self-organizing tasks in the collective by using pheromone-based indirect communication. Following the example of nature, this concept could also be a paradigm for controlling traffic, for recognizing and avoiding traffic congestions, where vehicles act like individual insects by depositing digital pheromones in order to indirectly benefit from their trail. Vehicles equipped with emerging positioning and communication technology virtually annotate their local environment and form a collective with decentralized, self-organizing capabilities. In this paper we present an approach for a technical implementation of a pheromone-based traffic system and try to prove that this concept from nature is also valid for controlling the traffic flow by using a complex micro simulator capable of simulating real city networks.