Abstract
The validity of simulation has been well-established for decades in areas such as computer and communication system. Recently, the technique has become entrenched in specific areas such as transportation and traffic forecasting. Several methods have been proposed for investigating complex traffic flows. However, the dynamics of vehicles and their driver's characteristics, even though it is known that they are important factors for any traffic flow analysis, have never been considered sufficiently. In this paper, the traffic simulation using a multi-agent approach with considering vehicle dynamics is proposed. The multi-agent system is constructed with the traffic environment and the agents of vehicle and driver. The traffic environment consists of multi-lane roads, nodes, virtual lanes, and signals. To ensure the fast calculation, the agents are performed on the based of the rules to regulate their behaviors. The communication frameworks are proposed for the agents to share the information of vehicles' velocity and position. The model of a driver agent which controls a vehicle agent is described in the companion paper. The vehicle model contains the nonlinear subcomponents of engine, torque converter, automatic transmission, and wheels. The simulation has proceeded for an interrupted and uninterrupted flow model. The result has shown that the driver agent performs human-like behavior ranging from slow and careful to fast and aggressive driving behavior, and that the change of the traffic state is closely related with the distance and the signal delay between intersections. The system developed shows the effectiveness and the practical usefulness of the traffic simulation.
