Fabian Rochner’s research while affiliated with Leibniz Universität Hannover and other places

In recent years, autonomic and organic computing have become areas of active research in the informatics community. Both initiatives aim at handling the growing complexity in technical systems by focusing on adaptation and self-optimisation capabilities. A promising application for organic concepts is the control of road traffic signals in urban areas. This article presents an organic approach to traffic light control in urban areas that exhibits adaptation and learning capabilities, allowing traffic lights to autonomously react on changing traffic conditions. A coordination mechanism for neighbouring traffic lights is presented that relies solely on locally available traffic data and communication among neighbouring intersections, resulting in a distributed and self-organising traffic system for urban areas. The organic system's efficiency is demonstrated in a simulation-based evaluation.

An increased mobility and the resulting rising traffic demands lead to serious congestion problems in many cities. Although there is not a single solution that will solve traffic congestion and the related environmental and economical problems, traffic light coordination is an important factor in achieving efficient networks. This paper presents a new distributed approach for dynamic traffic light coordination that relies on locally available traffic data and communication among neighboring intersections. The coordination mechanism is combined with an organic traffic control approach to form an adaptive, distributed control system with learning capabilities. The efficiency of the resulting organic system is demonstrated in a simulation-based evaluation.

In recent years, Autonomic and Organic Computing have become areas of active research in the computer science community. Both initiatives aim at handling the growing complexity in technical systems by creating systems with adaptation and self-optimisation capabilities. One application scenario for such "life-like" systems is the control of road traffic signals in urban areas. This paper presents an organic approach to traffic light control and analyses its performance by an experimental validation of the proposed architecture which demonstrates its benefits compared to classical traffic control.

In the past, the focus of the computer industry has been to improve hardware performance and add more and more features to the software. As a result, more and more appliances surrounding us are equipped with embedded computational power and wireless communication. As such, they become ever more flexible and multifunctional, and almost indispensable in daily life. On the other hand, the resulting systems become increasingly complex and unreliable, posing new challenges to designer and user. Organic Computing (OC) has the vision to address the challenges of complex distributed systems by making them more life-like (organic), i.e. endowing them with abilities such as self- organization, self-configuration, self-repair, or adaptation. The designer's task is simplified, because it is no longer necessary to exactly specify the low-level system behavior in all possible situations that might occur, but instead leaving the system with a certain degree of freedom which allows it to react in an intelligent way to new situations. Also, use of such systems is simplified, as they can be controlled by setting few high-level goals, rather than having to manipulate many low-level parameters with unclear influence. In this paper, we give a general introduction to OC, and propose a generic observer-controller architecture as a framework for designing OC systems. Then, it is shown how to use this architecture at the example of a traffic light controller. The paper concludes with a summary and a discussion of future challenges.

Efficient control of traffic networks is ac omple xb ut important task. A successful network management vitally depends on the abilities of the traffic light controllers to adapt to changing traffic situations. In this paper ac ontrol architecture for traffic nodes is presented that is inspired by the principles of Organic Comput- ing. It allows an ode to quickly adapt to changing traffic situations and enables it to autonomously learn ne wc ontrol strategies if necessary .

Summury This article briefly reviews systems, which show self-organizational behavior and defines emergence as their central property. Then it tries to contrast emergent behavior, which is a bottom-up process, with the classical top-down design process. In the last section the paper discusses the Observer/Controller concept as a possible solution to this apparent contradiction.

We present an approach to design an improved control system for arbitrary urban traffic networks based on Organic Computing concepts. For control of these networks a decentralized structure consisting of small computers at every node of the net is proposed. Each node is viewed as an autonomous agent with limited sensory horizon. It tries to adapt itself such that the local traffic throughput is maximized. Additionally communication takes place between adjacent nodes which leads to an iterative global optimisation through collaboration of the agents. The paper discusses the approach in detail and introduces the controller architecture.