Wenxuan Ao

Jun Zhang, Wenxuan Ao, Junbo Yan et al.

With the development of artificial intelligence techniques, transportation system optimization is evolving from traditional methods relying on expert experience to simulation and learning-based decision and optimization methods. Learning-based optimization methods require extensive interactions with highly realistic microscopic traffic simulators. However, existing microscopic traffic simulators are inefficient in large-scale scenarios and thus fail to support the adoption of these methods in large-scale transportation system optimization scenarios. In addition, the optimization scenarios supported by existing simulators are limited, mainly focusing on the traffic signal control. To address these challenges, we propose the first open-source GPU-accelerated large-scale microscopic simulator for transportation system simulation and optimization. The simulator can iterate at 84.09Hz, which achieves 88.92 times computational acceleration in the large-scale scenario with 2,464,950 vehicles compared to the best baseline CityFlow. Besides, it achieves a more realistic average road speeds simulated on real datasets by adopting the IDM model as the car-following model and the randomized MOBIL model as the lane-changing model. Based on it, we implement a set of microscopic and macroscopic controllable objects and metrics provided by Python API to support typical transportation system optimization scenarios. We choose five representative scenarios and benchmark classical rule-based algorithms, reinforcement learning algorithms, and black-box optimization algorithms in four cities. These experiments effectively demonstrate the usability of the simulator for large-scale traffic system optimization. The code of the simulator is available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/moss. We build an open-registration web platform available at https://moss.fiblab.net to support no-code trials.

Jinwei Zeng, Chao Yu, Xinyi Yang et al.

City-scale traffic signal control (TSC) involves thousands of heterogeneous intersections with varying topologies, making cooperative decision-making across intersections particularly challenging. Given the prohibitive computational cost of learning individual policies for each intersection, some researchers explore learning a universal policy to control each intersection in a decentralized manner, where the key challenge is to construct a universal representation method for heterogeneous intersections. However, existing methods are limited to universally representing information of heterogeneous ego intersections, neglecting the essential representation of influence from their heterogeneous neighbors. Universally incorporating neighborhood information is nontrivial due to the intrinsic complexity of traffic flow interactions, as well as the challenge of modeling collective influences from neighbor intersections. To address these challenges, we propose CityLight, which learns a universal policy based on representations obtained with two major modules: a Neighbor Influence Encoder to explicitly model neighbor's influence with specified traffic flow relation and connectivity to the ego intersection; a Neighbor Influence Aggregator to attentively aggregate the influence of neighbors based on their mutual competitive relations. Extensive experiments on five city-scale datasets, ranging from 97 to 13,952 intersections, confirm the efficacy of CityLight, with an average throughput improvement of 11.68% and a lift of 22.59% for generalization.