Professor Anita Raja and Eliyahu Friedman (EE'16) co-author paper with Mohammad Hasan, Ana Bazzan titled "A Multiagent Solution to Overcome Selfish Routing In Transportation Networks" that was accepted to the IEEE 19th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC 2016), Rio De Janeiro Brazil.

Abstract

It  is  well-known  that  selfish  routing,  where  individual  agents  make  uncoordinated  greedy  routing  decisions,does  not  produce  a  socially  desirable  outcome  in  transport and  communication  networks.  In  this  paper,  we  address  this general  problem  of  the  loss  of  social  welfare  that  occurs  due to uncoordinated behavior in networks and model it as a multiagent  coordination  problem.  Specifically  we  study  strategies to  overcome  selfish  routing  in  traffic  networks  with  multiple routes where a subset of vehicles are part of a social network that exchanges traffic related data. We investigate classic traffic flow paradoxes that are ubiquitous in various types of networks leading  to  severe  congestion.  We  present  a  novel  distributed traffic coordination algorithm that alleviates congestion by harnessing the real-time information available through the driver’s online  social  network.  We  also  propose  a  utility  computation mechanism for route choice that generates near-optimal flows.Our extensive simulation results show that social network based multiagent traffic route coordination contributes to mitigate the effects of these paradoxes and significantly reduces congestion