Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to Multimodal Adaptive Traffic Signal Control

Download or read book Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to Multimodal Adaptive Traffic Signal Control written by Soheil Mohamad Alizadeh Shabestary and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With perpetually increasing demand for transportation as a result of continued urbanization and population growth, it is essential to increase the existing transportation infrastructure. Optimizing traffic signals in real time, although is one of the primary tools to increase the efficiency of our urban transportation networks, is a difficult task, due to the non-linearity and stochasticity of the traffic system. Deriving a simple model of the intersection in order to design an appropriate adaptive controller is extremely challenging, and traffic signal control falls under the challenging category of sequential decision-making processes. One of the best approaches to resolving issues around adaptive traffic signal control is reinforcement learning (RL), which is model-free and suitable for sequential decision-making problems. Conventional discrete RL algorithms suffer from the curse of dimensionality, slow training, and lack of generalization. Therefore, we focus on developing continuous RL-based (CRL) traffic signal controller that addresses these issues. Also, we propose a more advanced deep RL-based (DRL) traffic signal controller that can handle high-dimensional sensory inputs from newer traffic sensors such as radars and the emerging technology of Connected Vehicles. DRL traffic signal controller directly operates with highly-detailed sensory information and eliminates the need for traffic experts to extract concise state features from the raw data (e.g., queue lengths), a process that is both case-specific and limiting. Furthermore, DRL extracts what it needs from the more detailed inputs automatically and improves control performance. Finally, we introduce two multimodal RL-based traffic signal controllers (MCRL and MiND) that simultaneously optimize the delay for both transit and regular traffic, as public transit is the more sustainable mode of transportation in busy cities and downtown cores. The proposed controllers are tested using Paramics traffic microsimulator, and the results show the superiority of both CRL and DRL over other state-of-practice and state-of-the-art traffic signal controllers. In addition to the advantages of MiND, such as its multimodal capabilities, significantly faster convergence, smaller model, and elimination of the feature extraction process, our experimental results show significant improvements in travel times for both transit and regular traffic at the intersection level compared to the base cases.