CityLight: A Neighborhood-inclusive Universal Model for Coordinated City-scale Traffic Signal Control

TL;DR

CityLight introduces a universal traffic signal control model that explicitly models and aggregates neighborhood influences, improving city-scale traffic flow efficiency and generalization across diverse intersections.

Contribution

It proposes a novel universal policy framework with neighbor influence encoding and aggregation, addressing heterogeneity and interaction complexities in traffic signal control.

Findings

Achieves 11.68% average throughput improvement

Demonstrates 22.59% generalization lift across datasets

Effective in controlling thousands of intersections

Abstract

City-scale traffic signal control (TSC) involves thousands of heterogeneous intersections with varying topologies, making cooperative decision-making across intersections particularly challenging. Given the prohibitive computational cost of learning individual policies for each intersection, some researchers explore learning a universal policy to control each intersection in a decentralized manner, where the key challenge is to construct a universal representation method for heterogeneous intersections. However, existing methods are limited to universally representing information of heterogeneous ego intersections, neglecting the essential representation of influence from their heterogeneous neighbors. Universally incorporating neighborhood information is nontrivial due to the intrinsic complexity of traffic flow interactions, as well as the challenge of modeling collective influences from neighbor intersections. To address these challenges, we propose CityLight, which learns a universal policy based on representations obtained with two major modules: a Neighbor Influence Encoder to explicitly model neighbor's influence with specified traffic flow relation and connectivity to the ego intersection; a Neighbor Influence Aggregator to attentively aggregate the influence of neighbors based on their mutual competitive relations. Extensive experiments on five city-scale datasets, ranging from 97 to 13,952 intersections, confirm the efficacy of CityLight, with an average throughput improvement of 11.68% and a lift of 22.59% for generalization.