Multi-Agent Traffic Simulations with Legal Reasoning Mechanisms

Abstract

Environmental issues such as exhaust emissions from traffic congestion and the spread of electric cars and self-driving cars are important topics in society, and people have been considering various traffic measures against these issues. On the other hand, it is hard to study the effects of traffic policies and laws on traffic flows by applying them to real space. We have developed a multi-agent traffic simulator, MACiMA, and have attempted to reproduce complex traffic phenomena and verify the effects of traffic measures through simulation. MACiMA represents traffic flows by the interaction of agents, but it has a heavy implementation burden to define the behaviour of each agents for the traffic policies in the program code. In this study, we investigated a mechanism for reasoning about the decision-making mechanism of agents based on traffic laws in conjunction with PROLEG, a legal reasoning system using the logic programming language Prolog. Experiments with the created simulator show that the agents dynamically decide their behaviour according to traffic laws and the effects on traffic caused by changes in their proportions.