California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This report describes a reinterpretation of how the philosophy underlying the Cartesiusmulti-jurisdictional incident management prototype can be used as an organizing princi-ple for real-world multi-jurisdictional systems. This interpretation focuses on the power ofthe Distributed Problem Solving (DPS) approach Cartesius uses to partition analysis andoptimization functions in the system across jurisdictions. This partitioning minimizes theamount of local information that must be shared between jurisdictions and paves the way fordefining a collection of TMC-to-TMC messages that support the Cartesius DPS perspectivein a manner that respects existing deployments.

Based on this interpretation, the report recommends building a new TMC software agentthat provides operators with a view of the system from Cartesius DPS perspective. This toolwill initially be advisory in nature, providing operators with guidance regarding how localactions are likely to conflict with the actions of neighboring jurisdictions (or lack thereof).Where it is appropriate, and where local policy permits, the new management agent couldalso be connected to available control subsystems to provide operational or tactical controlin response to problems in the system.