A Cooperative Information System for Managing Traffic Incidents with the PAUSETA Protocol

When a serious traffic incident happens several independent agencies must be coordinated in order to allocate the necessary resources to attend it. Currently, the coordination among these agencies is done manually, increasing the response time. In this paper is presented an information system suitable to be applied to reach agreements in a distributed and autonomous way among agencies about which an agency should give which resource to manage a traffic incident. This information system is guided by the PAUSETA protocol, which executes a distributed combinatorial auction for resource allocation. By using this protocol several issues around private information about resource features and availability and administrative and legal competences are individually managed by each agency. This information system has been implemented following a multi-agent software architecture. The prototype has been tested for a real traffic incident scenario in Castellón (Spain). The results obtained are consistent with respect to the ones it might provide an optimum centralized system. However this optimum centralized system is impossible to apply due to the inherent distributed nature of the problem addressed.