Urban Traffic Control Based on Learning Agents

The optimization of traffic light control systems is at the heart of work in traffic management. Many of the solutions considered to design efficient traffic signal patterns rely on controllers that use pre-timed stages. Such systems are unable to identify dynamic changes in the local traffic flow and thus cannot adapt to new traffic conditions. An alternative, novel approach proposed by computer scientists in order to design adaptive traffic light controllers relies on the use of intelligent agents. The idea is to let autonomous entities, named agents, learn an optimal behavior by interacting directly in the system. By using machine learning algorithms based on the attribution of rewards according to the results of the actions selected by the agents, we can obtain a control policy that tries to optimize the urban traffic flow. In this paper, we explain how we designed an intelligent agent that learns a traffic light control policy. We also compare this policy with results from an optimal pre-timed controller.