Evaluating the Robustness of Reinforcement Learning based Adaptive Traffic Signal Control
Reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted increasing interest for adaptive traffic signal control due to its model-free ability to learn control policies directly from interaction with the traffic environment. However, several challenges remain before RL-based signal control can be considered ready for field deployment. Many existing studies rely on simplified signal timing structures, robustness of trained models under varying traffic demand conditions remains insufficiently evaluated, and runtime efficiency continues to pose challenges when training RL algorithms in traffic microscopic simulation environments. This study formulates an RL-based signal control algorithm capable of representing a full eight-phase ring-barrier configuration consistent with field signal controllers. The algorithm is trained and evaluated under varying traffic demand conditions and benchmarked against state-of-the-practice actuated signal control (ASC). To assess robustness, experiments are conducted across multiple traffic volumes and origin-destination (O-D) demand patterns with varying levels of structural similarity. To improve training efficiency, a distributed asynchronous training architecture is implemented that enables parallel simulation across multiple computing nodes. Results from a case study intersection show that the proposed RL-based signal control significantly outperforms optimized ASC, reducing average delay by 11-32% across movements. A model trained on a single O-D pattern generalizes well to similar unseen demand patterns but degrades under substantially different demand conditions. In contrast, a model trained on diverse O-D patterns demonstrates strong robustness, consistently outperforming ASC even under highly dissimilar unseen demand scenarios.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Reinforcement LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
An Open-Source Framework for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control
Sub-optimal control policies in transportation systems negatively impact mobility, the environment and human health. Developing optimal transportation control systems at the appropriate scale can be difficult as cities' …
Open-Ended Question AnsweringReinforcement LearningTraffic Signal ControlA Parallel Hybrid Action Space Reinforcement Learning Model for Real-world Adaptive Traffic Signal Control
Adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) can effectively reduce vehicle travel times by dynamically adjusting signal timings but poses a critical challenge in real-world scenarios due to the complexity of real-time decisio…
Decision MakingSequential Decision MakingTraffic Signal ControlTraffic Signal Control with Communicative Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents: a Case Study
In this work we analyze Multi-Agent Advantage Actor-Critic (MA2C) a recently proposed multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that can be applied to adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) problems. To evaluate its p…
Deep Reinforcement LearningMulti-agent Reinforcement Learningreinforcement-learningReinforcement Learning+2Deep Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control
Many existing traffic signal controllers are either simple adaptive controllers based on sensors placed around traffic intersections, or optimized by traffic engineers on a fixed schedule. Optimizing traffic controllers …
Deep Reinforcement Learningreinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)+1Robustness of Reinforcement Learning-Based Traffic Signal Control under Incidents: A Comparative Study
Reinforcement learning-based traffic signal control (RL-TSC) has emerged as a promising approach for improving urban mobility. However, its robustness under real-world disruptions such as traffic incidents remains largel…
BenchmarkingTraffic Signal Control