Large-Scale Urban Traffic Management Using Zero-Shot Knowledge Transfer in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Intersection Patterns

Abstract

The automatic control of vehicle traffic in large urban networks constitutes one of the most serious challenges to modern societies, with an impact on improving the quality of human life and saving energy and time. Intersections are a special traffic structure of pivotal importance as they accumulate a large number of vehicles that should be served in an optimal manner. Constructing intelligent models that manage to automatically coordinate and steer vehicles through intersections is a key point in the fragmentation of traffic control, offering active solutions through the flexibility of automatically adapting to a variety of traffic conditions. Responding to this call, this work aims to propose an integrated active solution of automatic traffic management. We introduce a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that effectively models traffic flow at individual unsignalized intersections. It relies on a compact agent definition, a rich information state space, and a learning process characterized not only by depth and quality, but also by substantial degrees of freedom and variability. The resulting driving profiles are further transferred to larger road networks to integrate their individual elements and compose an effective automatic traffic control platform. Experiments are conducted on simulated road networks of variable complexity, demonstrating the potential of the proposed method.