Transport modeling by multi-agent systems: a swarm intelligence approach

There are a number of emergent traffic and transportation phenomena that cannot be analyzed successfully and explained using analytical models. The only way to analyze such phenomena is through the development of models that can simulate behavior of every agent. Agent-based modeling is an approach based on the idea that a system is composed of decentralized individual ‘agents’ and that each agent interacts with other agents according to localized knowledge. The agent-based approach is a ‘bottom-up’ approach to modeling where special kinds of artificial agents are created by analogy with social insects. Social insects (including bees, wasps, ants and termites) have lived on Earth for millions of years. Their behavior in nature is primarily characterized by autonomy, distributed functioning and self-organizing capacities. Social insect colonies teach us that very simple individual organisms can form systems capable of performing highly complex tasks by dynamically interacting with each other. On the other hand, a large number of traditional engineering models and algorithms are based on control and centralization. In this article, we try to obtain the answer to the following question: Can we use some principles of natural swarm intelligence in the development of artificial systems aimed at solving complex problems in traffic and transportation?