Preference-Conditioned Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Runtime-Tunable Transit Signal Priority
For traffic engineers and transit agencies, it provides a flexible, single-policy solution to dynamically adjust TSP priorities without retraining, addressing a practical need for operational adaptability.
This work introduces a preference-conditioned multi-objective RL controller for transit signal priority that allows runtime tuning of the trade-off between bus delay and overall traffic delay via a single parameter, outperforming fixed-time and rule-based baselines while maintaining constraint feasibility.
Transit signal priority (TSP) requires balancing competing objectives: reducing bus delay while limiting adverse impacts on non-bus traffic and avoiding extreme waits for a subset of vehicles. Existing reinforcement-learning (RL) approaches to TSP typically encode transit-aware features (e.g., occupancy and schedule deviation) but optimize a fixed reward or fixed scalarization, which limits operational flexibility when agency priorities change across time-of-day or disruption conditions. We present a preference-conditioned TSP controller, $π(a \mid s,w)$, that selects the next signal phase under minimum/maximum green and transition-feasibility constraints and can be tuned at runtime via a preference parameter $w$ to trade off bus-priority emphasis against overall traffic delay without retraining. We implement this on top of IntersectionZoo by introducing a constrained signal-control/TSP wrapper, and we extend scenario generation with bus-prevalence augmentation and timetable-based bus insertion to address sparse transit-priority events during training. Experiments against fixed-time control, a rule-based TSP overlay, and fixed-weight PPO specialists show that a single learned conditioned policy spans a smooth empirical trade-off frontier across runtime preferences, outperforms fixed-time and rule-based baselines, and maintains constraint feasibility, while tail-delay diagnostics reveal that non-bus externalities remain limited for moderate preference settings but can increase substantially under high bus-priority weights. The source code of this work is available at https://github.com/urbanAIthi/morl-tsp.