Traffic Flow Analysis Based on the Local Rules

Several methods are proposed for investigating the complex traffic flow. However, the dynamics of vehicle and the driver's characteristic, which are important factor for the traffic flow analysis, are not considered enough so far. This paper describes a new concept for simulating complex traffic flow by multiple agents. The agents are considered as a kind of artificial life (A-Life) and they behave based on their own knowledge independently. Drivers, vehicles, roads and traffic environment, which are essential elements in our simulation, are defined as the agents. The vehicle agent combined with a driver agent works based on driver's region of sight and their own characteristics. The road agent communicates with the vehicle agent responding velocity, position of the vehicle. The effectiveness of our new method for modeling the traffic flow is shown by simulation study.