Abstract
Nowadays, the development of automated traffic systems has been gaining increasing attention, and a substantial amount of effort has been invested in trying to find a solution to problems associated with road transport. Among these problems are road accidents caused by human-related factors, such as tiredness, loss of control, a slow reaction time and limited field of view. Another transport-related problem is that of loss of time which may be caused by a slow driving speed due to weather conditions, road conditions, visibility, traffic congestion, etc. The general problem of automated road transportation system can be instantiated into more specific transportation domains, such as the transportation system in a city, in an airport, in a park, in a manufacturing plant. In this article, we present a holonic simulation environment for the Global Automated Transportation System in which a distributed multi-agent model is used to manage dynamic environments. The case study scenario presented in this article is related to a manufacturing plant. In this scenario, there are different transportation vehicles, such as automated guided vehicles, trucks, lift trucks and cars. These vehicles have different features that make the transportation planning a complex problem. Moreover, dynamic events are triggered to simulate anomalous situations in which a repairing process must be executed in order to maintain the transportation system into a security execution. The simulated results prove that a distributed multi-agent model for autonomous road transportation systems is a secure approach to manage critical situations and autonomous execution of different levels in the problem. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.
