Optimizing smart city planning: A deep reinforcement learning framework

Abstract

We introduce a deep reinforcement learning-based approach for smart city planning, designed to determine the optimal timing for constructing various smart city components such as apartments, base stations, and hospitals over a specified development period. Utilizing the Dueling Deep Q-Network (DQN), the proposed method aims to maximize the city’s population while maintaining a predetermined happiness level of residents in the smart city. This optimization is achieved through strategic construction of smart city components, considering that both the total population and happiness levels are influenced by the interplay between housing, communication, transportation, and healthcare infrastructures, as well as the population ratio. Specifically, we present two distinct formulations of the Markov Decision Process (MDP) for smart city planning to illustrate the practicality of applying reinforcement learning across different scenarios.