An Artificial Market for Efficient Allocation of Road Transport Networks

Abstract

The efficient utilisation of large and distributed socio-technical systems is a difficult problem. Centralised approaches can be computationally intractable, unresponsive to change and require extensive knowledge of the underlying system. In the last decade, distributed approaches based on artificial markets have been proposed as a paradigm for the design and the control of complex systems, such as group of robots or distributed computation environments. In this work we model an artificial market as a framework for the efficient allocation of a road transport network, where each network portion is controlled by a market agent that “produces mobility” on its links. We demonstrate that the collective behaviour of the market agents, if properly designed, lead to an optimised use of the road network.