Traffic Light Cycle Configuration of Single Intersection Based on Modified Q-Learning

Abstract

In recent years, within large cities with a high population density, traffic congestion has become more and more serious, resulting in increased emissions of vehicles and reducing the efficiency of urban operations. Many factors have caused traffic congestion, such as insufficient road capacity, high vehicle density, poor urban traffic planning and inconsistent traffic light cycle configuration. Among these factors, the problems of traffic light cycle configuration are the focal points of this paper. If traffic lights can adjust the cycle dynamically with traffic data, it will reduce degrees of traffic congestion significantly. Therefore, a modified mechanism based on Q-Learning to optimize traffic light cycle configuration is proposed to obtain lower average vehicle delay time, while keeping significantly fewer processing steps. The experimental results will show that the number of processing steps of this proposed mechanism is 11.76 times fewer than that of the exhaustive search scheme, and also that the average vehicle delay is only slightly lower than that of the exhaustive search scheme by 5.4%. Therefore the proposed modified Q-learning mechanism will be capable of reducing the degrees of traffic congestions effectively by minimizing processing steps.

Keywords

• traffic congestion
• traffic light cycle configuration
• machine learning
• reinforcement learning
• q-learning