A Novel Multi-Agent Deep RL Approach for Traffic Signal Control
This addresses traffic congestion for urban planners and commuters, but it is incremental as it builds on existing multi-agent deep reinforcement learning techniques.
The paper tackles traffic signal control in large-scale urban networks by proposing a Friend-Deep Q-network (Friend-DQN) approach based on multi-agent cooperation, which reduces state-action space and speeds up convergence, showing feasibility and superiority over existing methods in simulations.
As travel demand increases and urban traffic condition becomes more complicated, applying multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL) to traffic signal control becomes one of the hot topics. The rise of Reinforcement Learning (RL) has opened up opportunities for solving Adaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATSC) in complex urban traffic networks, and deep neural networks have further enhanced their ability to handle complex data. Traditional research in traffic signal control is based on the centralized Reinforcement Learning technique. However, in a large-scale road network, centralized RL is infeasible because of an exponential growth of joint state-action space. In this paper, we propose a Friend-Deep Q-network (Friend-DQN) approach for multiple traffic signal control in urban networks, which is based on an agent-cooperation scheme. In particular, the cooperation between multiple agents can reduce the state-action space and thus speed up the convergence. We use SUMO (Simulation of Urban Transport) platform to evaluate the performance of Friend-DQN model, and show its feasibility and superiority over other existing methods.