GPLight+: A Genetic Programming Method for Learning Symmetric Traffic Signal Control Policy

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Liao, Xiao-Cheng, Mei, Yi, Zhang, Mengjie
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Liao, Xiao-Cheng
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
author_facet Liao, Xiao-Cheng
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
contents Recently, learning-based approaches, have achieved significant success in automatically devising effective traffic signal control strategies. In particular, as a powerful evolutionary machine learning approach, Genetic Programming (GP) is utilized to evolve human-understandable phase urgency functions to measure the urgency of activating a green light for a specific phase. However, current GP-based methods are unable to treat the common traffic features of different traffic signal phases consistently. To address this issue, we propose to use a symmetric phase urgency function to calculate the phase urgency for a specific phase based on the current road conditions. This is represented as an aggregation of two shared subtrees, each representing the urgency of a turn movement in the phase. We then propose a GP method to evolve the symmetric phase urgency function. We evaluate our proposed method on the well-known cityflow traffic simulator, based on multiple public real-world datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed symmetric urgency function representation can significantly improve the performance of the learned traffic signal control policies over the traditional GP representation on a wide range of scenarios. Further analysis shows that the proposed method can evolve effective, human-understandable and easily deployable traffic signal control policies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16090
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GPLight+: A Genetic Programming Method for Learning Symmetric Traffic Signal Control Policy
Liao, Xiao-Cheng
Mei, Yi
Zhang, Mengjie
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recently, learning-based approaches, have achieved significant success in automatically devising effective traffic signal control strategies. In particular, as a powerful evolutionary machine learning approach, Genetic Programming (GP) is utilized to evolve human-understandable phase urgency functions to measure the urgency of activating a green light for a specific phase. However, current GP-based methods are unable to treat the common traffic features of different traffic signal phases consistently. To address this issue, we propose to use a symmetric phase urgency function to calculate the phase urgency for a specific phase based on the current road conditions. This is represented as an aggregation of two shared subtrees, each representing the urgency of a turn movement in the phase. We then propose a GP method to evolve the symmetric phase urgency function. We evaluate our proposed method on the well-known cityflow traffic simulator, based on multiple public real-world datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed symmetric urgency function representation can significantly improve the performance of the learned traffic signal control policies over the traditional GP representation on a wide range of scenarios. Further analysis shows that the proposed method can evolve effective, human-understandable and easily deployable traffic signal control policies.
title GPLight+: A Genetic Programming Method for Learning Symmetric Traffic Signal Control Policy
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16090