Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1805.10906

Tangramob: an agent-based simulation framework for validating urban smart mobility solutions

Carlo Castagnari·Flavio Corradini·Francesco De Angelis·Jacopo de Berardinis·Giorgio Forcina·Andrea Polini
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Estimating the effects of introducing a range of smart mobility solutions within an urban area is a crucial concern in urban planning. The lack of a Decision Support System (DSS) for the assessment of mobility initiatives, forces local public authorities and mobility service providers to base their decisions on guidelines derived from common heuristics and best practices. These approaches can help planners in shaping mobility solutions, but given the high number of variables to consider the effects are not guaranteed. Therefore, a solution conceived respecting the available guidelines can result in a failure in a different context. In particular, difficult aspects to consider are the interactions between different mobility services available in a given urban area, and the acceptance of a given mobility initiative by the inhabitants of the area. In order to fill this gap, we introduce Tangramob, an agent-based simulation framework capable of assessing the impacts of a Smart Mobility Initiative (SMI) within an urban area of interest. Tangramob simulates how urban traffic is expected to evolve as citizens start experiencing the newly offered traveling solutions. This allows decision makers to evaluate the efficacy of their initiatives taking into account the current urban system. In this paper we provide an overview of the simulation framework along with its design. To show the potential of Tangramob, 3 mobility initiatives are simulated and compared on the same scenario. This shows how it is possible to perform comparative experiments so as to align mobility initiatives to the user goals.

Explore related subjects

cs.MA

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Carlo Castagnari, Flavio Corradini, Francesco De Angelis, Jacopo de Berardinis, Giorgio Forcina, Andrea Polini. 2018-05-28. Tangramob: an agent-based simulation framework for validating urban smart mobility solutions. https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.10906

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

A Task-Oriented Multi-Agent Framework for Complex Wearable Health Analysis

Wearable health questions often combine data retrieval, longitudinal analysis, and health advice over structured records. Prompting a single large language model with a complete record and a composite query obscures whether every request is executed and which evidence supports the answer. We propose a task-oriented multi-agent framework that represents a composite query as distinct intents and typed tasks with explicit intra-intent dependencies. Specialized agents execute retrieval, analysis, and advice tasks; isolated intent states preserve request boundaries and evidence relationships before aggregation. We evaluate the framework on a synthetic dataset of $10{,}000$ virtual users with one month of longitudinal wearable records, covering structured data retrieval, multi-intent recognition, and overall response quality. Across $1{,}500$ retrieval questions, the Query Agent achieves $98.3\%$ accuracy, compared with $97.9\%$ for the Direct LLM baseline, while reducing average query-stage token consumption from $6{,}869$ to $3{,}136$. On $180$ multi-intent questions, the Manager Agent achieves $100.0\%$ Multi-Intent Coverage and $94.4\%$ Multiset Jaccard Similarity. Under the current synthetic evaluation setting, our method receives higher mean Trustworthiness and Transparency scores on both question categories, whereas Actionability does not improve consistently. These results provide preliminary evidence that explicit task organization can support task-relevant data access and data-grounded longitudinal analysis, while leaving health advice generation and validation on real wearable data as open challenges.

cs.MA↗
arXiv2026

Mixed-integer flow formulations for motion planning and decision-making of networked multi-agent systems

This work investigates the use of flow-based connectivity maintenance constraints in mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) trajectory planning and decision-making models for networked multi-agent systems (MAS). We integrate flow-based encodings for standard and k-hop connectivity into MILP multi-vehicle maneuvering models that are widely used alongside receding horizon planning strategies. Their necessity and sufficiency is demonstrated, guaranteeing full coverage of potential network topologies. The flow formulation for standard connectivity decreases the growth of the required inequality constraints from exponential to polynomial w.r.t. the size of the MAS when compared to the state-of-the-art subtour elimination (SEC) method. The flow-based k-hop connectivity constraints decrease the number of required binary variables and decouple its growth from the number of hops. However, the impact of these formulations in performance is not straightforward due to the introduction of a substantial number of continuous flow optimization variables and, in the case of k-hop connectivity, additional inequality constraints. We investigate this trade-off through a statistical evaluation of costs and optimization times using a conventional branch-and-bound commercial solver and trials performed with randomized environments for increasingly larger MAS. The results show that the flow formulation outperforms SEC in standard connectivity problems, enabling the solutions to be computed for larger MAS considering the imposed optimization time limit. The reduction in number of binary variables enabled by the k-hop flow formulations decreases the theoretical worst-case number of iterations required by the branch-and-bound algorithm to compute the global optimal solution. Our results show that this advantage did not translate into improvements in the average performance when compared to the baseline.

cs.MA↗
arXiv2026

Perception-Aware Communication Middleware for Distributed Visual Perception in UAV Swarms

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) swarms increasingly support safety-critical applications that rely on distributed visual perception. Meeting the low-latency requirements of these applications can require perception models to execute within the swarm on inference-capable UAVs, creating a need for efficient UAV-to-UAV transport of high-bandwidth perception data. However, the Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of perception differ from conventional packet-level QoS; successful delivery of individual packets does not ensure that a complete, timely, and usable image is available for inference. We present a novel perception-aware communication middleware that treats complete perception-data samples as the communication objects for which QoS must be satisfied. The middleware extends a lightweight UDP broker-based publish-subscribe architecture with perception-specific services, including image fragmentation and reconstruction, concurrent packet transmission, priority-aware scheduling, and image quality assessment. The middleware is evaluated on a heterogeneous hardware testbed emulating a UAV swarm using YOLOv8n object detection. Experimental results demonstrate low end-to-end application latency, substantially higher throughput than a lightweight UDP broker, effective prioritization of perception traffic under increasing background load, and mitigation of object-detection degradation through middleware-level image quality assessment. This work provides an initial framework for integrating AI-specific data handling into communication middleware to support emerging distributed AI applications in multi-agent mobile cyber-physical systems.

cs.MA↗