Yuhang Zhang

Yue Hu, Yuhang Zhang, Yanbing Wang et al.

With the rapid development of Internet of Things technologies, the next generation traffic monitoring infrastructures are connected via the web, to aid traffic data collection and intelligent traffic management. One of the most important tasks in traffic is anomaly detection, since abnormal drivers can reduce traffic efficiency and cause safety issues. This work focuses on detecting abnormal driving behaviors from trajectories produced by highway video surveillance systems. Most of the current abnormal driving behavior detection methods focus on a limited category of abnormal behaviors that deal with a single vehicle without considering vehicular interactions. In this work, we consider the problem of detecting a variety of socially abnormal driving behaviors, i.e., behaviors that do not conform to the behavior of other nearby drivers. This task is complicated by the variety of vehicular interactions and the spatial-temporal varying nature of highway traffic. To solve this problem, we propose an autoencoder with a Recurrent Graph Attention Network that can capture the highway driving behaviors contextualized on the surrounding cars, and detect anomalies that deviate from learned patterns. Our model is scalable to large freeways with thousands of cars. Experiments on data generated from traffic simulation software show that our model is the only one that can spot the exact vehicle conducting socially abnormal behaviors, among the state-of-the-art anomaly detection models. We further show the performance on real world HighD traffic dataset, where our model detects vehicles that violate the local driving norms.

Yuhang Zhang, Marcos Quinones-Grueiro, Zhiyao Zhang et al.

Variable Speed Limit (VSL) control acts as a promising highway traffic management strategy with worldwide deployment, which can enhance traffic safety by dynamically adjusting speed limits according to real-time traffic conditions. Most of the deployed VSL control algorithms so far are rule-based, lacking generalizability under varying and complex traffic scenarios. In this work, we propose MARVEL (Multi-Agent Reinforcement-learning for large-scale Variable spEed Limits), a novel framework for large-scale VSL control on highway corridors with real-world deployment settings. MARVEL utilizes only sensing information observable in the real world as state input and learns through a reward structure that incorporates adaptability to traffic conditions, safety, and mobility, thereby enabling multi-agent coordination. With parameter sharing among all VSL agents, the proposed framework scales to cover corridors with many agents. The policies are trained in a microscopic traffic simulation environment, focusing on a short freeway stretch with 8 VSL agents spanning 7 miles. For testing, these policies are applied to a more extensive network with 34 VSL agents spanning 17 miles of I-24 near Nashville, TN, USA. MARVEL-based method improves traffic safety by 63.4% compared to the no control scenario and enhances traffic mobility by 58.6% compared to a state-of-the-practice algorithm that has been deployed on I-24. Besides, we conduct an explainability analysis to examine the decision-making process of the agents and explore the learned policy under different traffic conditions. Finally, we test the response of the policy learned from the simulation-based experiments with real-world data collected from I-24 and illustrate its deployment capability.