Engineering mobility in large multi agent systems: A case study in urban traffic management

The complexity raised in modem software systems seems to be no longer affordable in terms of the abstractions and methodologies promoted by traditional approaches to computer science and software engineering and radically new approaches are required. This paper focuses on the problem of engineering the motion coordination of a large-scale multi-agent system, and proposes an approach that takes inspiration from the laws of physics. Our idea is to have the movements of agents driven by force fields, generated by the agents themselves and propagated via some infrastructure or by the agents in an ad-hoc way. A globally coordinated and self-organized behavior in the agent's movements can then emerge due to the interrelated effects of agents following the shape of the fields and dynamic fields re-shaping. The approach is presented and its effectiveness described with regard to a concrete case study in the area of urban traffic management.