Urban traffic signal control using reinforcement learning agents

Abstract

This study presents a distributed multi-agent-based traffic signal control for optimising green timing in an urban arterial road network to reduce the total travel time and delay experienced by vehicles. The proposed multi-agent architecture uses traffic data collected by sensors at each intersection, stored historical traffic patterns and data communicated from agents in adjacent intersections to compute green time for a phase. The parameters like weights, threshold values used in computing the green time is fine tuned by online reinforcement learning with an objective to reduce overall delay. PARAMICS software was used as a platform to simulate 29 signalised intersection at Central Business District of Singapore and test the performance of proposed multi-agent traffic signal control for different traffic scenarios. The proposed multi-agent reinforcement learning (RLA) signal control showed significant improvement in mean time delay and speed in comparison to other traffic control system like hierarchical multi-agent system (HMS), cooperative ensemble (CE) and actuated control. © 2010 The Institution of Engineering and Technology.