Diagnosing Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Signal Control

TL;DR

This paper re-examines reinforcement learning for traffic signal control, proposing a simple, theoretically grounded method that guarantees travel time minimization and outperforms existing complex approaches.

Contribution

It introduces LIT, a simple and theoretically supported RL method with concise state and reward design for traffic signal control.

Findings

LIT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Simple state and reward design is effective for traffic signal control.

Theoretically guarantees travel time minimization.

Abstract

With the increasing availability of traffic data and advance of deep reinforcement learning techniques, there is an emerging trend of employing reinforcement learning (RL) for traffic signal control. A key question for applying RL to traffic signal control is how to define the reward and state. The ultimate objective in traffic signal control is to minimize the travel time, which is difficult to reach directly. Hence, existing studies often define reward as an ad-hoc weighted linear combination of several traffic measures. However, there is no guarantee that the travel time will be optimized with the reward. In addition, recent RL approaches use more complicated state (e.g., image) in order to describe the full traffic situation. However, none of the existing studies has discussed whether such a complex state representation is necessary. This extra complexity may lead to significantly slower learning process but may not necessarily bring significant performance gain. In this paper, we propose to re-examine the RL approaches through the lens of classic transportation theory. We ask the following questions: (1) How should we design the reward so that one can guarantee to minimize the travel time? (2) How to design a state representation which is concise yet sufficient to obtain the optimal solution? Our proposed method LIT is theoretically supported by the classic traffic signal control methods in transportation field. LIT has a very simple state and reward design, thus can serve as a building block for future RL approaches to traffic signal control. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art traffic signal control methods.