Deep Reinforcement Learning Adaptive Traffic Signal Control

Abstract

Sub-optimal automated transportation control systems incur high mobility, human health and environmental costs. With society reliant on its transportation systems for the movement of individuals, goods and services, minimizing these costs benefits many. Intersection traffic signal controllers are an important element of modern transportation systems that govern how vehicles traverse road infrastructure. Many types of traffic signal controllers exist; fixed time, actuated and adaptive. Adaptive traffic signal controllers seek to minimize transportation costs through dynamic control of the intersection. However, many existing adaptive traffic signal controllers rely on heuristic or expert knowledge and were not originally designed for scalability or for transportation’s big data future. This research addresses the aforementioned challenges by developing a scalable system for adaptive traffic signal control model development using deep reinforcement learning in traffic simulation. Traffic signal control can be modelled as a sequential decision-making problem; reinforcement learning can solve sequential decision-making problems by learning an optimal policy. Deep reinforcement learning makes use of deep neural networks, powerful function approximators which benefit from large amounts of data. Distributed, parallel computing techniques are used to provide scalability, with the proposed methods validated on a simulation of the City of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, consisting of 196 intersections. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by successfully developing a scalable system for adaptive traffic signal control model development and validating it on the largest traffic microsimulator in the literature. The proposed system reduces delay, queues, vehicle stopped time and travel time compared to conventional traffic signal controllers. Findings from this research include that using reinforcement learning methods which explicitly develop the policy offers improved performance over purely value-based methods. The developed methods are expected to mitigate the problems caused by sub-optimal automated transportation signal controls systems, improving mobility and human health and reducing environmental costs.