The evolution of high-reliability coordination mechanisms for collision avoidance

Resource sharing and allocation are important coordination problems in most processes and organizations. They are especially critical in transportation systems, where the resource to be shared and allocated is the space through which various vehicles move and the problem is ensuring that vehicles do not conflict in their use of the space—that is, that they do not collide. Transportation systems are interesting because they accomplish this resource allocation in a highly reliable and often highly distributed fashion.