Swarm intelligence systems for transportation engineering: Principles and applications

Agent-based modeling is an approach based on the idea that a system is composed of decentralized individual “agents” and that each agent interacts with other agents according to localized knowledge. Special kinds of artificial agents are the agents created by analogy with social insects. Social insects (bees, wasps, ants, and termites) have lived on Earth for millions of years. Their behavior is primarily characterized by autonomy, distributed functioning, and self-organizing capacities. Social insect colonies teach us that very simple organisms can form systems capable of performing highly complex tasks by dynamically interacting with each other. Swarm intelligence is the branch of artificial intelligence based on study of behavior of individuals in various decentralized systems. The paper presents a classification and analysis of the results achieved using swarm intelligence (SI) to model complex traffic and transportation processes. The primary goal of this paper is to acquaint readers with the basic principles of Swarm Intelligence, as well as to indicate potential swarm intelligence applications in traffic and transportation.