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Cooperative adaptative cruise controls and variable speed limit are gaining notoriety in recent years to fulfill the aim of reducing traffic congestions. Improvements in the management of hazardous materials, combined with these technologies, can reduce damages caused by congestions, mitigate risks to human health, and avoid environmental leakage. Drivers' behaviors are directly influenced by human beings' different reactions. Therefore, the variance in traffic produces shockwaves, rippling traffic waves, and a reduction of the traffic flow capacity. This paper aims to present adaptative optimal control of nonlinear systems simulation as a tool to prove the effects of the predictions according to drivers' behavior. Furthermore, it supports the decision making of hazardous material traffic management. Traffic engineering and queuing theory are also addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of modeling and simulation aids in deriving many decisions related to transportation planning and traffic operations. Representing the real systems via simulation allows exploring system behavior in an articulated way, which is often impossible in the real world. In this paper, a simulation-based framework is presented to evaluate the impact of congestion charging on daily activity plans of the individuals. Personal decision to accept the congestion charges is evaluated by comparing the value of time with congestion charge. Value of time varies throughout the day depending upon the time pressure at any moment exerted by preceding and succeeding activities. Time pressure during an activity increases if available time for that activity is insufficient to attain the perceived utility. Daily activities in the schedules are modeled using bell-shaped marginal utility that results in sigmoid utility. A model is presented which derives the activity-specific parameters of the marginal utility function for the specific individual. To examine value of time of each person, the congestion charging is applied where personal willingness-to-pay is determined by comparing the ratios of cost to utility for original and adapted schedules. A large-scaled microsimulation of the modeled framework is used to simulate the whole population, which is created by FEATHERS, an operational activity-based model for Flanders, Belgium. The results of the simulation show that the number of individuals who avoid the congestion charges by adapting their schedules is almost three times the number of those who agree to pay it. The proposed framework can be useful to evaluate the tradeoff between value of time and costs where flexibility in selection of time defines the variability in cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic is highly influenced by network structure and human behaviour. Small changes in the human behaviour can lead to huge changes in the load of a traffic network. Current transportation models do not, and most of them cannot, research such random behaviour but always calculate a steady state. In our multi-agent transport simulation, we frequently observe seemingly random “network breakdowns”, huge traffic jams that spread over a big part of the network, making a normal traffic flow impossible. This paper describes the investigations that were performed on the results of our large-scale multi-agent transport simulations in an attempt to contribute to the better understanding of the dynamic processes in such simulations and, hopefully, better understanding and modelling of the real-world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a multi-agent coordination mechanism applied to intersection simulation situations. In a goal of urban traffic simulation, we must consider the dynamic interactions between autonomous vehicles. The field of multi-agent systems provides us some studies for such systems, in particular on the coordination mechanisms. Conflicts between vehicles (i.e. agents) are very frequent in such applications, and they may cause deadlocks, particularly at intersections such as crossroads. Our approach is based on the solving of two player games/decision matrices which characterize three basic situations. An aggregation method generalizes to n-player games for complex crossroads. The objective of this approach consists in searching basic two-player matrices for solving n-agent problems. To explain the principle, we describe our approach for a particular case of crossroad with three agents. Finally, the obtained results have been examined via a tool of road traffic simulation. ARCHISIM. We assume also that the global traffic replicates the behavior of agents in different situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]