Lee D. Han

Diyi Liu, Lanmin Liu, Lee D Han

Ramp metering is the act of controlling on-going vehicles to the highway mainlines. Decades of practices of ramp metering have proved that ramp metering can decrease total travel time, mitigate shockwaves, decrease rear-end collisions by smoothing the traffic interweaving process, etc. Besides traditional control algorithm like ALINEA, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been introduced to build a finer control. However, two remaining challenges still hinder DRL from being implemented in the real world: (1) some assumptions of algorithms are hard to be matched in the real world; (2) the rich input states may make the model vulnerable to attacks and data noises. To investigate these issues, we propose a Deep Q-Learning algorithm using only loop detectors information as inputs in this study. Then, a set of False Data Injection attacks and random noise attack are designed to investigate the robustness of the model. The major benefit of the model is that it can be applied to almost any ramp metering sites regardless of the road geometries and layouts. Besides outcompeting the ALINEA method, the Deep Q-Learning method also shows a good robustness through training among very different demands and geometries. For example, during the testing case in I-24 near Murfreesboro, TN, the model shows its robustness as it still outperforms ALINEA algorithm under Fast Gradient Sign Method attacks. Unlike many previous studies, the model is trained and tested in completely different environments to show the capabilities of the model.

Diyi Liu, Hyeonsup Lim, Majbah Uddin et al.

The US Census Bureau has collected two rounds of experimental data from the Commodity Flow Survey, providing shipment-level characteristics of nationwide commodity movements, published in 2012 (i.e., Public Use Microdata) and in 2017 (i.e., Public Use File). With this information, data-driven methods have become increasingly valuable for understanding detailed patterns in freight logistics. In this study, we used the 2017 Commodity Flow Survey Public Use File data set to explore building a high-performance freight mode choice model, considering three main improvements: (1) constructing local models for each separate commodity/industry category; (2) extracting useful geographical features, particularly the derived distance of each freight mode between origin/destination zones; and (3) applying additional ensemble learning methods such as stacking or voting to combine results from local and unified models for improved performance. The proposed method achieved over 92% accuracy without incorporating external information, an over 19% increase compared to directly fitting Random Forests models over 10,000 samples. Furthermore, SHAP (Shapely Additive Explanations) values were computed to explain the outputs and major patterns obtained from the proposed model. The model framework could enhance the performance and interpretability of existing freight mode choice models.