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Experience classification for transfer learning in traffic signal control

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Abstract

In recent years, due to the drastic rise in the number of vehicles and the lack of sufficient infrastructure, traffic jams, air pollution, and fuel consumption have increased in cities. The optimization of timing for traffic lights is one of the solutions for the mentioned problems. Many methods have been introduced to deal with these problems, including reinforcement learning. Although a great number of learning-based methods have been used in traffic signal control, they suffer from poor performance and slow learning convergence. In this paper, a transfer learning-based method for traffic signal control has been proposed. Multi-agent system has also been used for modelling the traffic network and transfer learning has been used to make reinforcement learning agents transfer their experience to each other. Furthermore, a classifier has been utilized to classify the transferred experiences. The results show that using the proposed method leads to a significant improvement on average delay time and convergence time of the learning process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran

    Mojtaba Norouzi & Monireh Abdoos

  2. Institute of Informatics, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Ana L. C. Bazzan

Authors
  1. Mojtaba Norouzi
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  2. Monireh Abdoos
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  3. Ana L. C. Bazzan
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Correspondence to Monireh Abdoos.

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Norouzi, M., Abdoos, M. & Bazzan, A.L.C. Experience classification for transfer learning in traffic signal control. J Supercomput 77, 780–795 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-020-03287-x

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