VTSIM: Attention-Based Recurrent Neural Network for Intersection Vehicle Trajectory Simulation

Simulating vehicle trajectories at intersections is one of the challenging tasks in traffic simulation. Existing methods are often ineffective due to the complexity and diversity of lane topologies at intersections, as well as the numerous interactions affecting vehicle motion. To address this issue, we propose a deep learning based vehicle trajectory simulation method. First, we employ a vectorized representation to uniformly extract features from traffic elements such as pedestrians, vehicles, and lanes. By fusing all factors that influence vehicle motion, this representation makes our method suitable for a variety of intersections. Second, we propose a deep learning model, which has an attention network to dynamically extract features from the surrounding environment of the vehicles. To address the issue of vehicles continuously entering and exiting the simulation scene, we employ an asynchronous recurrent neural network for the extraction of temporal features. Comparative evaluations against existing rule-based and deep learning-based methods demonstrate our model's superior simulation accuracy. Furthermore, experimental validation on public datasets demonstrates that our model can simulate vehicle trajectories among the urban intersections with different topologies including those not present in the training dataset.