In the last decade, economic approaches based on computational markets have been proposed as a paradigm for the design and the control of complex socio-technical systems, such as urban road traffic systems. The control problem of an urban road traffic system can be modelled as a distributed resource allocation problem, in order to apply market-based techniques as solution method. In this work, we design a competitive computational market, where driver agents trade the use of the capacity inside

more »

... the intersections with intersection manager agents. We show how the market dynamics influence the drivers' behaviour, leading to a more efficient use of the urban road traffic system, in terms of lower average travel times and less congestion.