Ludovic Leclercq

Jiajie Yu, Pierre-Antoine Laharotte, Yu Han et al.

Perimeter Control (PC) strategies have been proposed to address urban road network control in oversaturated situations by regulating the transfer flow of the Protected Network (PN) based on the Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD). The uniform metering rate for cordon signals in most existing studies overlooks the variance of local traffic states at the intersection level, which may cause severe local traffic congestion and degradation of the network stability. PC strategies with heterogeneous metering rates for cordon signals allow precise control for the perimeter but the complexity of the problem increases exponentially with the scale of the PN. This paper leverages a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL)-based traffic signal control framework to decompose this PC problem, which considers heterogeneous metering rates for cordon signals, into multi-agent cooperation tasks. Each agent controls an individual signal located in the cordon, decreasing the dimension of action space for the controller compared to centralized methods. A physics regularization approach for the MARL framework is proposed to ensure the distributed cordon signal controllers are aware of the global network state by encoding MFD-based knowledge into the action-value functions of the local agents. The proposed PC strategy is operated as a two-stage system, with a feedback PC strategy detecting the overall traffic state within the PN and then distributing local instructions to cordon signals controllers in the MARL framework via the physics regularization. Through numerical tests with different demand patterns in a microscopic traffic environment, the proposed PC strategy shows promising robustness and transferability. It outperforms state-of-the-art feedback PC strategies in increasing network throughput, decreasing distributed delay for gate links, and reducing carbon emissions.

Eunhan Ka, Ludovic Leclercq, Satish V. Ukkusuri

Traffic state estimation from sparse fixed sensors is challenging because physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) tend to over-smooth the shockwaves admitted by the Lighthill-Whitham-Richards (LWR) model. This study proposes Adaptive Domain Decomposition Physics-Informed Neural Networks (ADD-PINN), a two-stage residual-guided framework for LWR-based offline speed-field reconstruction. A coarse global PINN is first trained; its spatial residual profile is then used to place subdomain boundaries and initialize child subnetworks in a decomposition-enabled mode, while a data-driven shock indicator can retain a single-domain fallback when localized evidence of transition is weak. The primary offline I-24 MOTION evaluation spans five days, five sensor configurations, and ten seeds per configuration, yielding 1,500 runs in total. Against neural and physics-informed baselines, ADD-PINN attains the lowest relative L2 error in 18 of 25 configurations and in 14 of 15 sparse-sensing cases, while training 2.4 times faster than the extended PINN (XPINN) baseline. An ablation study supports spatial-only decomposition as an effective default for fixed-sensor traffic reconstruction in the evaluated settings. Supplementary Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) experiments serve as a negative control: the shock indicator suppresses decomposition in all 50 runs, and the default single-domain fallback ranks first across all sensor configurations. These results support residual-guided spatial decomposition as an effective PINN-family design for offline reconstruction when sparse fixed sensing coincides with localized transition regions.

Zhixiong Jin, Dimitrios Tsitsokas, Nikolas Geroliminis et al.

In large-scale traffic optimization, models based on Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram (MFD) are recognized for their efficiency in broad network analyses. However, they fail to reflect variations in the individual traffic status of each road link, leading to a gap in detailed traffic optimization and analysis. To address the limitation, this study introduces a Local Correction Factor (LCF) that represents local speed deviations between the actual link speed and the MFD average speed based on the link configuration. The LCF is calculated using a deep learning function that takes as inputs the average speed from the MFD and the road network configuration. Our framework integrates Graph Attention Networks (GATs) with Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) to capture both the spatial configurations and temporal correlations within the network. Coupled with a strategic network partitioning method, our model enhances the precision of link-level traffic speed estimations while preserving the computational advantages of aggregate models. In our experiments, we evaluate the proposed LCF across various urban traffic scenarios, including different levels of origin-destination trip demand and distribution, as well as diverse road configurations. The results demonstrate the robust adaptability and effectiveness of the proposed model. Furthermore, we validate the practicality of our model by calculating the travel time of each randomly generated path, achieving an average error reduction of approximately 84% relative to MFD-based results.