Multiagent model of rail-road intersection with connected vehicles

The multiagent approach to modelling, traditionally dedicated for distributed systems, can be applied on any platform where there are more processes or control threads. The world of surface transport is a typical example of such a situation where high numbers of dynamic entities (agents) interacting with each other represent a complex problem to solve, analyse and visualise. The main focus of this paper is on functional description of the traffic control problem at the rail-road intersection. Unlike conventional approaches, this model assumes usage of modern (infrastructure-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-vehicle) communication technologies as an essential base of cooperative intelligent transportation systems. The authors use the development toolkit NetLogo, explaining step-by-step the key programming details, to get a comprehensive overview of the operation of the entire system through simple definitions of a number of simple cooperating agents. The introduced model is implementation free and shows newly offered functionalities on the principal level, while a minimum theory of collective intelligence hidden in the background is needed.