Alleviating Congestion in Restricted Urban Areas with Cooperative Intersection Management

Congested urban traffic frequently deviates toward residential areas, where due to local conditions congestion builds up quickly. The increasing traffic flow there causes health, environmental and safety problems. A pragmatic solution is to make these areas infeasible as escape routes. In the following, an area wide cooperative intelligent intersection management system is proposed, aiming at suppressing the number of passing-through vehicles if their density increases too much. The solution is based on communicating traffic light controllers using the analogy of the Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) protocol and organized as a hierarchical Multiagent System. The system was implemented by extending an open-source traffic simulation tool, so called Eclipse SUMO. Simulations were performed on a simplified model of a residential area. The efficacy of the proposal was evaluated with Macroscopic Fundamental Diagrams of the investigated traffic. The results are promising opening way to further research.