Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning with Clustering and Information Sharing for Traffic Light Cooperative Control

In order to improve the joint control effect of multi-crossing, Multi-Agent Deep Recurrent Q-Network (MADRQN) for real-time control of multi-intersection traffic signals is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the traffic light control is modeled as a Markov decision process, wherein one controller at each crossing is considered as an agent. Secondly, agents are clustered according to their position and observation. Then, information sharing and centralized training are conducted within each cluster. Also the value function network parameters of agents with the highest critic value are shared with other agent at the end of every training process. The simulated experimental results under Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) show that the proposed method can reduce the amount of communication data, make information sharing of agents and centralized training more feasible and efficient. The average delay of vehicles is reduced obviously compared with the state-of-the-art traffic light control methods based on multi-agent deep reinforcement learning. The proposed method can effectively alleviate traffic congestion. © 2024 Science Press. All rights reserved.