TY - JOUR T1 - A robustness approach to the distributed management of traffic intersections JF - Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing Y1 - 2019 A1 - González, Cesar L. A1 - Zapotecatl, Jorge L. A1 - Gershenson, Carlos A1 - Alberola, Juan M. A1 - Julian, Vicente AB - Nowadays, the development of autonomous vehicles has emerged as an approach to considerably improve the traffic management in urban zones. Thanks to automation in vehicles as well as in other sectors, the probability of errors, typically due to repetitive tasks, has been drastically reduced. Therefore, technological aids in current driving systems are aimed to avoid or reduce human errors like imprudences or distractions. According to this, it is possible to tackle complex scenarios such as the automation of the vehicles traffic at intersections, as this is one of the points with the highest probability of accidents. In this sense, the coordination of autonomous vehicles at intersections is a trending topic. In the last few years, several approaches have been proposed using centralized solutions. However, centralized systems for traffic coordination have a limited fault-tolerance. This paper proposes a distributed coordination management system for intersections of autonomous vehicles through the employment of some well-defined rules to be followed by vehicles. To validate our proposal, we have developed different experiments in order to compare our proposal with other centralized approaches. Furthermore, we have incorporated the management of communication faults during the execution in our proposal. This improvement has also been tested in front of centralized or semi-centralized solutions. The introduction of failures in the communication process demonstrates the sensitivity of the system to possible disturbances, providing a satisfactory coordination of vehicles during the intersection. As final result, our proposal is kept with a suitable flow of autonomous vehicles still with a high communication fails rate. SN - 1868-5145 UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-019-01424-w ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Deliberative Self-Organizing Traffic Lights with Elementary Cellular Automata JF - Complexity Y1 - 2017 A1 - Zapotecatl, Jorge L. A1 - Rosenblueth, David A. A1 - Gershenson, Carlos AB - Self-organizing traffic lights have shown considerable improvements compared to traditional methods in computer simulations. Self-organizing methods, however, use sophisticated sensors, increasing their cost and limiting their deployment. We propose a novel approach using simple sensors to achieve self-organizing traffic light coordination. The proposed approach involves placing a computer and a presence sensor at the beginning of each block; each such sensor detects a single vehicle. Each computer builds a virtual environment simulating vehicle movement to predict arrivals and departures at the downstream intersection. At each intersection, a computer receives information across a data network from the computers of the neighboring blocks and runs a self-organizing method to control traffic lights. Our simulations showed a superior performance for our approach compared with a traditional method (a green wave) and a similar performance (close to optimal) compared with a self-organizing method using sophisticated sensors but at a lower cost. Moreover, the developed sensing approach exhibited greater robustness against sensor failures. VL - 2017 UR - https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/7691370/7691370 ER -