Intelligent Traffic Network Control in the Era of Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

In the era of internet of vehicles, both the traffic signal control and the rerouting of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) are essential techniques to alleviate traffic congestion and improve traffic efficiency. However, these two schemes have been treated separately without a unified framework allowing for joint optimization in the previous studies. In the case of traffic congestion at the bottleneck intersections, either of the two schemes alone is not enough. To this end, we propose to jointly control the traffic lights and the CAVs under the reinforcement learning (RL) framework. To lower the dimensionality of this learning problem, we propose to control the route choices of the CAVs through a few common scalar parameters instead of controlling the CAVs individually. In particular, the rerouting ratios are dynamically adjusted. A model-based method is further proposed to estimate the expected travel time with reduced estimation error. We then exploit the tools from deep RL and put forth an efficient algorithm that is able to control the green time allocation of traffic signals and the rerouting of CAVs jointly. Comprehensive numerical experiments demonstrate the validity of our proposed models and show the traffic efficiency can be significantly improved with our proposed algorithm.