A Study of Route Assignment Strategy Based on Anticipatory Stigmergy

SUMMARY In this paper, we evaluate how to provide or control traffic information based on anticipatory stigmergy. Managing traffic congestion is one of the main issues for smart cities, and many efforts have been made to address it from the perspective of IT and transportation research. Recently, dynamic coordination methods have been made possible by using shorter term traffic information that can be gathered by probe vehicles or smartphones. Some attempts have been made to handle short‐term traffic information in which a stigmergy‐based approach is employed as an indirect communication method for cooperation among distributed agents and for managing traffic congestion. One drawback of these approaches is that handling near‐future congestion remains difficult because stigmergies basically represent past information. Therefore, we propose anticipatory stigmergy for sharing information about the near future and adequate driver allocation. All vehicles submit their near‐future intentions as anticipatory stigmergy in order to search for routes. Preliminary results demonstrate that anticipatory stigmergy with an assignment strategy functions well.