Agent-Based Passing Place Management on Single-Track Roads Using the UK Highway Code

Single-track roads are narrow bi-directional roads often found in UK rural areas. They are vital to local communities but pose various challenges to drivers and the simulation of traffic. One key aspect of navigating single-track roads is managing dedicated passing places, short widenings of the road that allow drivers to pass each other. State-of-the-art traffic simulators lack the full functionality to model and resolve passing place scenarios on single-track roads, thus limiting their effectiveness in simulating these environments. This paper contributes to this gap through determining whether the guidance provided in the UK Highway Code is capable of resolving the passing place problem. Using AgentSpeak and a BDI framework, autonomous agents were programmed with the behaviours governed by the Highway Code and evaluated in a number of simulated scenarios. Results show that the Highway Code can improve performance over the state-of-the-art, but struggles to resolve more complex real-world passing place scenarios.