An Ontology for Traffic Flow Management (ALTERNATE PAPER)

Traffic Flow Management (TFM) is a complex field that involves a variety of participants, terminology, concepts, actions, and relationships. We are in the process of building an agent-based simulation of a proposed concept of Collaborative Traffic Flow Management (CTFM), and found that informal representations were not adequate, given the complexity of the domain. Our solution was to construct an ontology of TFM, which is a formal knowledge structure that encodes information about a particular domain of interest. We describe our development and use of this ontology, and present lessons learned and other potential applications.