Affordance-based Agent model for road traffic simulation

Feirouz Ksontini (1, 2) , René Mandiau (1) , Zahia Guessoum (3) , Stéphane Espié (2)

1 LAMIH - Laboratoire d'Automatique, de Mécanique et d'Informatique industrielles et Humaines - UMR 8201
2 IFSTTAR - Institut Français des Sciences et Technologies des Transports, de l'Aménagement et des Réseaux
3 SMA - Systèmes Multi-Agents

Existing traffic simulations often consider normative driver behavior. Drivers do not always use physically delineated lanes: sometimes drivers use the entire road surface. Thus, current traffic simulations do not reproduce all observed urban and suburban traffic phenomena. To improve the validity of urban and suburban traffic simulations, we propose to consider driving context and driver behavior in terms of occupied space. We endow driver agents with an ego-centered representation of the environment based on the concept of affordances and virtual lanes. Affordances thus identify the possible space occupation actions afforded by the environment and by other agents. The proposed model was implemented using our ArchiSim tool. We show that this model is more efficient and realistic than existing models. The experiments also reproduce real traffic situations and compare simulated data to real data.

Mots clés: Multi-agent simulation; Affordances; Traffic simulation; Virtual lanes; Driver behavior; Ego-centered representation; Space occupation

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Feirouz Ksontini, René Mandiau, Zahia Guessoum, Stéphane Espié. Affordance-based Agent model for road traffic simulation. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2015, 29 (5), pp.821-849. ⟨10.1007/s10458-014-9269-x⟩. ⟨hal-01168839⟩