RESUMO A área de sistemas inteligentes de transporte há muito investiga como empregar tecnologias da informação e comunicação a fim de melhorar a eficiência do sistema como um todo. Isso se traduz basicamente em monitorar e gerenciar a oferta (rede viária, semáforos etc.) e a demanda (deslocamentos de pessoas e mercadorias). A esse esforço, mais recentemente, estão sendo adicionadas técnicas de inteligência artificial. Essa tem o potencial de melhorar a utilização da infraestrutura existente, a fim de melhor atender a demanda. Neste trabalho é fornecido um panorama focado especificamente em duas tarefas onde a inteligência artificial tem contribuições relevantes, a saber, controle semafórico e escolha de rotas. Os trabalhos aqui discutidos objetivam otimizar a oferta e/ou distribuir a demanda.

ABSTRACT The field of of intelligent transportation systems has long investigated how to employ information and communication technologies to improve the efficiency of the system as a whole. This basically means to monitor and manage both supply (traffic network, traffic signals etc.) and demand (vehicles, people and goods). More recently, artificial intelligence techniques are being added to this effort, as they have the potential to improve the usage of existing infrastructure to meet the corresponding demand. In this paper, an overview is given, focusing specifically on two tasks where artificial intelligence has made relevant contributions, namely, traffic signal controls and route choices. The works discussed here aim at optimize the supply and/or distribute the demand.

One of the well studied issues in multi-agent systems is the standard action-selection problem where a goal task can be performed in different ways, by different agents. Also the sequence of these actions can influence the goal achievement or its quality. This class of problems has been tackled under different approaches. At the high-level coordination one, the specification of the organizational issues is crucial. However, in dynamic environments, agents must be able to adapt to the changing organizational goals, available resources, their relationships to the presence of another agents, and so on. This problem is a key one in multi-agent systems and relates to models of learning and adaptation, such as those observed among social insects. The present paper tackles the process of generating, adapting, and changing multi-agent organization dynamically at system runtime, using a swarm inspired approach. This approach is used here mainly for task allocation with low need of pre-planning and specification, and no need of explicit coordination. The results of our approach and another quantitative one are compared here and it is shown that in dynamic domains, the agents adapt to changes in the organization, just as social insects do.