Learning Traffic Signal Control via Genetic Programming

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Liao, Xiao-Cheng, Mei, Yi, Zhang, Mengjie
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Liao, Xiao-Cheng
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
author_facet Liao, Xiao-Cheng
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
contents The control of traffic signals is crucial for improving transportation efficiency. Recently, learning-based methods, especially Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), garnered substantial success in the quest for more efficient traffic signal control strategies. However, the design of rewards in DRL highly demands domain knowledge to converge to an effective policy, and the final policy also presents difficulties in terms of explainability. In this work, a new learning-based method for signal control in complex intersections is proposed. In our approach, we design a concept of phase urgency for each signal phase. During signal transitions, the traffic light control strategy selects the next phase to be activated based on the phase urgency. We then proposed to represent the urgency function as an explainable tree structure. The urgency function can calculate the phase urgency for a specific phase based on the current road conditions. Genetic programming is adopted to perform gradient-free optimization of the urgency function. We test our algorithm on multiple public traffic signal control datasets. The experimental results indicate that the tree-shaped urgency function evolved by genetic programming outperforms the baselines, including a state-of-the-art method in the transportation field and a well-known DRL-based method. Our code is available online.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_17328
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Traffic Signal Control via Genetic Programming
Liao, Xiao-Cheng
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
The control of traffic signals is crucial for improving transportation efficiency. Recently, learning-based methods, especially Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), garnered substantial success in the quest for more efficient traffic signal control strategies. However, the design of rewards in DRL highly demands domain knowledge to converge to an effective policy, and the final policy also presents difficulties in terms of explainability. In this work, a new learning-based method for signal control in complex intersections is proposed. In our approach, we design a concept of phase urgency for each signal phase. During signal transitions, the traffic light control strategy selects the next phase to be activated based on the phase urgency. We then proposed to represent the urgency function as an explainable tree structure. The urgency function can calculate the phase urgency for a specific phase based on the current road conditions. Genetic programming is adopted to perform gradient-free optimization of the urgency function. We test our algorithm on multiple public traffic signal control datasets. The experimental results indicate that the tree-shaped urgency function evolved by genetic programming outperforms the baselines, including a state-of-the-art method in the transportation field and a well-known DRL-based method. Our code is available online.
title Learning Traffic Signal Control via Genetic Programming
topic Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17328