CBLab: Supporting the Training of Large-scale Traffic Control Policies with Scalable Traffic Simulation

TL;DR

CBLab is a scalable traffic simulation toolkit enabling large-scale urban traffic control policy training and optimization, addressing previous limitations in scalability and data availability for real city networks.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive infrastructure with a high-efficiency simulator, extensive city road network data, and an interactive environment for policy training in large urban scenarios.

Findings

Supports large-scale traffic simulation for 100 cities.

Enables training and tuning of traffic control policies.

Supported the City Brain Challenge @ KDD CUP 2021.

Abstract

Traffic simulation provides interactive data for the optimization of traffic control policies. However, existing traffic simulators are limited by their lack of scalability and shortage in input data, which prevents them from generating interactive data from traffic simulation in the scenarios of real large-scale city road networks. In this paper, we present \textbf{C}ity \textbf{B}rain \textbf{Lab}, a toolkit for scalable traffic simulation. CBLab consists of three components: CBEngine, CBData, and CBScenario. CBEngine is a highly efficient simulator supporting large-scale traffic simulation. CBData includes a traffic dataset with road network data of 100 cities all around the world. We also develop a pipeline to conduct a one-click transformation from raw road networks to input data of our traffic simulation. Combining CBEngine and CBData allows researchers to run scalable traffic simulations in the road network of real large-scale cities. Based on that, CBScenario implements an interactive environment and a benchmark for two scenarios of traffic control policies respectively, with which traffic control policies adaptable for large-scale urban traffic can be trained and tuned. To the best of our knowledge, CBLab is the first infrastructure supporting traffic control policy optimization in large-scale urban scenarios. CBLab has supported the City Brain Challenge @ KDD CUP 2021. The project is available on GitHub:~\url{https://github.com/CityBrainLab/CityBrainLab.git}.