CoLight: Learning Network-level Cooperation for Traffic Signal Control

Cooperation among the traffic signals enables vehicles to move through intersections more quickly. Conventional transportation approaches implement cooperation by pre-calculating the offsets between two intersections. Such pre-calculated offsets are not suitable for dynamic traffic environments. To enable cooperation of traffic signals, in this paper, we propose a model, CoLight, which uses graph attentional networks to facilitate communication. Specifically, for a target intersection in a network, CoLight can not only incorporate the temporal and spatial influences of neighboring intersections to the target intersection, but also build up index-free modeling of neighboring intersections. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use graph attentional networks in the setting of reinforcement learning for traffic signal control and to conduct experiments on the large-scale road network with hundreds of traffic signals. In experiments, we demonstrate that by learning the communication, the proposed model can achieve superior performance against the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 10 pages. Proceedings of the 28th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. ACM, 201

Planning & Scheduling Applications in Urban Traffic Management

Local authorities that manage traffic-related issues in urban areas have to optimise the use of available resources, in order to minimise congestion and delays. In this context, Automated Planning and Scheduling can be fruitfully exploited, in order to provide dynamic plans that help managing the urban road network. In this paper we provide a review of existing planning and scheduling approaches that have been designed for dealing with different aspects of traffic management, with the aim of gaining insights on the limits of current applications, and highlighting the open challenges

Multi-agent quality of experience control

In the framework of the Future Internet, the aim of the Quality of Experience (QoE) Control functionalities is to track the personalized desired QoE level of the applications. The paper proposes to perform such a task by dynamically selecting the most appropriate Classes of Service (among the ones supported by the network), this selection being driven by a novel heuristic Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithm. The paper shows that such an approach offers the opportunity to cope with some practical implementation problems: in particular, it allows to face the so-called “curse of dimensionality” of MARL algorithms, thus achieving satisfactory performance results even in the presence of several hundreds of Agents