Transportation Research Part C 10 (2002) 325–329

www.elsevier.com/locate/trc

Guest Editorial

Intelligent agents in traffic and transportation

Abstract
Transportation Research, Part C is a forum designed to serve as a focus for new efforts and achievements
in traffic research. While its past issues have been a fertile ground for new scientific concepts and paradigms
it is the appropriate international scientific platform to recognize the importance of agent technologies for
the traffic research community. Thus I am very glad to follow Leighton ChipperfieldÕs (Social Science
Department of Elsevier Science, Oxford, UK) invitation to be the guest editor for this special issue of
Transportation Research, Part C.
Ó 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

For more than two years we have been living in a new millennium. Looking backward to the
visions of our grandparents we see that they expected the world in the year 2000 to be covered
with big cities under glass domes connected by imaginative zeppelins, with multi-ply subway
systems under the ground and with fast-moving catwalks on the surface. Now, we made the step
over the age. And in fact traffic is an actual topic. It is probably the big area under discussion
of this century. The rapid change of a location, enabled by plane, highspeed-rail and car travel,
has constantly become easier, has constantly become more natural. These days we travel with-
out any of the difficulties that accompanied taking a trip less than a century ago. All we have to
do is to organize and to pick up that transport mode that comes closest to our personal objec-
tives.
During the last few years our world has changed. Borders between countries and between
continents have overcome––at least at many places. And with these, many features of our every-
day life have changed, too, or have been set in motion. Globalization, individualization and in-
formation age are no more only slogans. The information availability, its distribution and
organization with respect to heterogeneous individuals have never been as important as they are
today. Particularly in the field of transport there has been a strong tendency towards individually
diverging transport needs leading to a demand for flexible and fast transport means. So there is
the intense need to understand and to model traffic on the level of single people equipped with
dissimilar characteristics, preferences and tastes to give an adequate picture of todayÕs traffic
landscape in order to enable us giving advise to the traffic-industry and to arrange and spread out
traffic and travel information efficiently.
0968-090X/02/$ - see front matter Ó 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
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326 Guest Editorial

It is especially the advance in data-processing that provides the base for many of these changes
in our world. Around the turn of the millennium two events, which set milestones in scientific
history, occurred. One was the victory of the chess program Deep Blue against the incumbent
chess world champion Garri Kasparow in 1997. And the other one was the deciphering of the
human genotype in 2000. Both became possible because of the computational resources available.
And these resources are steadily increasing. According to MooreÕs law the speed of CPUs doubles
every one and a half year. And if this will also be true for our future it is much less than a century
until a single CPU will possess as much transistors as there are neurons in our brain. However,
computational resources such as processor power and network machines are just one aspect of
sophisticated future developments in data-processing.
Advanced programming techniques like the quite new programming paradigm called agent
technology are another piece of the puzzle. This computer paradigm has become a significant area
in computer science. Researchers and practitioners have now realized that single-agent systems,
multi-agent systems and distributed artificial intelligence are widespread attractive because they
consider a social side of computer systems, ranging from human-computer interaction over dis-
tributed problem solving to the simulation of social systems. They are some sort of a natural
metaphor for building a wide range of computer applications, ranging from quite simple email
supervisors to complex and time-critical systems such as traffic control.

2. Intelligent agents

Despite its attractiveness the idea of intelligent agents seems to successfully resist all attempts of
providing a clear definition. Although there are numerous people working in the area of agent
technology and although all might have a certain consideration of what an agent is and of what
makes up an agent, there is no universally accepted agreement for a definition of the concept of
intelligent agents. Sometimes it seems that there are nearly as many definitions as there are re-
searchers who publish on agent technology, probably because each definition grew directly out of
the application area the definer had in mind. They are often built around human-level descriptions
of agent activities, regarding software agents as some form of an artificial secretary, or as Coen
noted ‘‘as the electronic counterpart of their real-world namesakes’’. Using this non-scientific idea
of an agent in a scientific setting it should not be astonishing that there exists only a fuzzy and
imprecise description of the idea of intelligent agents. Nevertheless in order to provide guideline
assistance some important characteristics of intelligent agents shall be listed here. These are
situatedness, subjective rationality, autonomy, robustness, coherence, personalizability and co-
operation.
Situatedness emphasizes that an agent is embedded in an environment and that it cannot be
defined independently from the spatial and temporal characteristics of this environment. An agent
receives information about its environment via sensors, interprets this information on the basis of
its knowledge and it interacts with the environment due to the processed information. Interaction
can be performed through different kinds of media. In the world of software agents transmitting
messages between agents and between agents and a human user is the usual way to do it. But also
other functionality that explicitly modifies the environment can be used.
 Guest Editorial 327

Subjective rationality means that an agent is equipped with more or less sophisticated intelli-
gence allowing it to perform problem solving and decision-making in order to find a solution that
is rational within the limits of its own information and computational abilities and within the
boarders of its subjective knowledge and resources. Typically decision-making as well as the al-
location of resources needs to be performed in real-time; a perfect decision that is available after
the requirement is gone is not useful at all.
Autonomy refers to the characteristic that an agent is out there in its world and it needs to be
able to decide for itself, in some cases there is no option for any interaction with its user. Thus an
agent needs to be able to execute actions independently that are ideally expected to bring a benefit
for its user. Otherwise it is just an overvalued front-end, once and for all time predetermined to
respond to a userÕs actions.
Robustness demands that an agent is prepared to learn and to recover from failure. Thus it sets
the focus on supervising, which results were achieved and which decisions were made, identifying
what went wrong, learning from the failure and possibly re-deciding on the task. This leads to
agents that do not consist of source code only but also of knowledge about the motivation for the
setting of variables and of parameters. So in some sense agents extend themselves through
monitoring and learning processes.
Coherence means that an agent needs to be equipped to form a picture of its world from many
different, possibly contradictory stimuli. This learning ability in the sense of continuous self-
calibration through recognition and combination of information that computationally compen-
sates hardware disadvantages might become some key technique to enable the utilization of highly
interconnected and cheap hardware components.
Personalizability refers to an agentÕs ability to adapt to the requirements of a user. In particular
an agent must be educable in the preferences and behavioral schemes of its user, especially because
tasks are not delegated to an instance of which a user cannot be sure that the task is carried out
according to his specifications and expectations.
Cooperation is the last item in the list. It refers to an agentÕs social abilities, i.e. to interact with
human beings or with other agents, if suitable, in order to solve its own task and to help others by
solving tasks together. Of course cooperation can only work when communication, either direct
or via the usage of resources, comes into play.
Surely, this list of attributes can only serve as a vague description of all of the attributes, which
make up an agent. As the contributions in these special issues will show, within a particular agent
some of them are more important and more deeply stressed and realized than others.

3. Summary of the contents of this issue

Taken together the papers in this issue provide a useful overview to give an impression of what
intelligent agents are and what they can do for us in the area of transportation.
The papers in the first part of this issue deal primarily with the usage of intelligent agents for
simulation purposes. The approaches make use of the characteristic that intelligent agents rep-
resent a type of computational intelligence as they operate similar to human populations––though
on an especially simplified scale. However, there are reasons to expect that already their simple
328 Guest Editorial

determinism is suitable to illustrate and to describe the dynamical structure of human behavior
with reference to traffic and transportation.
The first paper in this issue, written by Hussein Dia, gives an introduction into intelligent agent
applications in transportation. Moreover it deals with the microscopic simulation of driverÕs route
choice behavior due to real-time traffic information provided by dynamically changing road signs.
The agentsÕ behavior model used in his approach is based on a survey that is also described in the
paper.
Peter HidasÕ paper describes a multi-agent traffic simulation system in which the entities are
driver-vehicle objects. Special emphasis is put on lane changing and merging behavior. After
providing an overview on literature on this topic the reader is endowed with the corresponding,
implemented heuristics. In addition simulation examples are described and discussed.
Third in the row is a paper by Rosaldo Rossetti, Rafael Bordini, Ana Bazzan, Sergio Bampi,
Ronghui Liu and Dirck Van Vliet who also use intelligent agents for simulation purposes. Their
focus is on investigating the influence of different types of traffic information in a commuter travel
scenario. One of their important contributions is to revitalize AgentSpeak(L), originally published
by Rao in 1996, and to illustrate that this language is a practical way to formalize a driverÕs
reasoning mechanism.
The authors of the next paper are Joachim Wahle, Michael Schreckenberg, Ana Bazzan and
Franziska Kluegl, who explore the impact of advanced traveler information systems in a two
route scenario.
With the next paper in this issue we leave the area of simulation. Haibo Chen and Margaret Bell
describe the Instrumented City database that is archived by the Institute of Transport Studies at
Leeds University. In their contribution they demonstrate how intelligent agents are applied for the
analysis of information from various sources.
The papers in the second part of this issue will show that the implication of the agent concept is
not limited to the domain of microscopic simulation, which was the main focus of the first part of
the issue. As the power to perform large scale computations becomes available, an increasing
interest to utilize agent technologies in other areas of traffic modeling and optimization can be
observed, e.g. traffic density forecasts, the visualization of driver as well as of pedestrian behavior,
the identification of driving factors for travel patterns, the optimization of route choice recom-
mendation, of traffic light and of traffic sign control, the management of incidents and the
planning of land use are only a few of them.
The second part of the issue starts with a contribution by Jeffrey Adler and Victor Blue sug-
gesting a solution concept for the efficient usage of network capacity taking into consideration
driversÕ personal preferences for mode, routing and departure/arrival time. In their approach net-
work managers, information service providers, and also drivers negotiate for network resources.
Next are Ronald van Katwijk and Paul van Koningsbruggen who put forward the utilization of
intelligent agents for incident management on a network of freeways by coordinating ramp me-
tering installations. Composed of simple interacting agents the sophisticated intelligence in their
approach lies in the network of interactions among the individual agents.
Josefa Hern andez, Sascha Ossowski and Ana Garcıa-Serrano are the authors of the consequent
paper. They report their practical experience with two agent-based Intelligent Traffic Manage-
ment Systems in the motorway network around Barcelona. The coordination models are de-
scribed and both systems are compared.
 Guest Editorial 329

The last paper is written by Filippo Logi and Stephen Ritchie. It illustrates a real-time decision
support system for traffic operation centers managing traffic congestion. The authors apply two
software agents acting and interacting on two separate knowledge-based systems.
All in all I have no doubt that these papers offer much insight into the computer paradigm
called intelligent agents and that they transfer the enthusiasm for this exciting and probably most
important area of research and development today.
On the whole this special issue on intelligent agents in traffic and in transportation are both a
summary of achievements in the near past and a glimpse towards the technological, professional
and socioeconomic challenges of the third millennium. Together with the authors I am sure to
offer you first-class scientific as well as attractive state-of-the-art contributions. Hopefully, after
reading through this special issue of Transportation Research, the readerÕs appetite for agent
technology in traffic and transportation keeps growing.

Acknowledgements

Now, since all is said and done for my part I once again want to take the opportunity to thank
everybody who was involved in this special issue. The authors really did an excellent job with their
papers and I am especially grateful for their patience while finalizing this issue. Special thanks are
directed to those authors who submitted papers, which were finally not included in this issue due
to limited space. Thus also good papers had to be rejected. However, I have no doubt that they
will find other, appropriate ways to publish the results of their research. I am also indebted to all
the anonymous referees who provided very helpful comments and suggestions under hard time
constraints. Last but not least, I want to thank Stephen Ritchie, the editor in chief of the general
issues of Transportation Research, Part C, and Elsevier Science for taking a chance with me and
with the intelligent agent topic.

Ralf Schleiffer
German Aerospace Center, Transport Research
Porz-Wahnheide, Linde Hoehe
51147 Cologne
Germany
E-mail address: ralf.schleiffer@dlr.de