Integrating Transit Signal Priority into Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning based Traffic Signal Control

TL;DR

This paper integrates Transit Signal Priority into multi-agent reinforcement learning for traffic signals, demonstrating improved bus delay reduction with coordinated strategies and analyzing stability and performance in simulation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of TSP into MARL-based traffic signal control, comparing decentralized and centralized training frameworks for TSP agents.

Findings

Coordinated TSP agents reduce bus delay by 27%.

Independent TSP agents reduce bus delay by 22%.

Slight increase in side street delay observed.

Abstract

This study integrates Transit Signal Priority (TSP) into multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) based traffic signal control. The first part of the study develops adaptive signal control based on MARL for a pair of coordinated intersections in a microscopic simulation environment. The two agents, one for each intersection, are centrally trained using a value decomposition network (VDN) architecture. The trained agents show slightly better performance compared to coordinated actuated signal control based on overall intersection delay at v/c of 0.95. In the second part of the study the trained signal control agents are used as background signal controllers while developing event-based TSP agents. In one variation, independent TSP agents are formulated and trained under a decentralized training and decentralized execution (DTDE) framework to implement TSP at each intersection. In the second variation, the two TSP agents are centrally trained under a centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) framework and VDN architecture to select and implement coordinated TSP strategies across the two intersections. In both cases the agents converge to the same bus delay value, but independent agents show high instability throughout the training process. For the test runs, the two independent agents reduce bus delay across the two intersections by 22% compared to the no TSP case while the coordinated TSP agents achieve 27% delay reduction. In both cases, there is only a slight increase in delay for a majority of the side street movements.