Self-organizing traffic control for congestion avoidance and traffic flow improvement

Social insects perform complex, self-organizing tasks in the collective by using pheromonebasedindirect communication. Following the example of nature, this concept could also be aparadigm for controlling traffic, for recognizing and avoiding traffic congestions, wherevehicles act like individual insects by depositing digital pheromones in order to indirectlybenefit from their trail.Vehicles equipped with emerging positioning and communication technology virtuallyannotate their local environment and form a collective with decentralized, self-organizingcapabilities.In this paper we present an approach for a technical implementation of a pheromone-basedtraffic system and try to prove that this concept from nature is also valid for controlling thetraffic flow by using a complex micro simulator capable of simulating real city networks.