An Efficiency Enhancing Methodology for Multiple Autonomous Vehicles in an Urban Network Adopting Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

To reduce the impact of congestion, it is necessary to improve our overall understanding of the influence of the autonomous vehicle. Recently, deep reinforcement learning has become an effective means of solving complex control tasks. Accordingly, we show an advanced deep reinforcement learning that investigates how the leading autonomous vehicles affect the urban network under a mixed-traffic environment. We also suggest a set of hyperparameters for achieving better performance. Firstly, we feed a set of hyperparameters into our deep reinforcement learning agents. Secondly, we investigate the leading autonomous vehicle experiment in the urban network with different autonomous vehicle penetration rates. Thirdly, the advantage of leading autonomous vehicles is evaluated using entire manual vehicle and leading manual vehicle experiments. Finally, the proximal policy optimization with a clipped objective is compared to the proximal policy optimization with an adaptive Kullback–Leibler penalty to verify the superiority of the proposed hyperparameter. We demonstrate that full automation traffic increased the average speed 1.27 times greater compared with the entire manual vehicle experiment. Our proposed method becomes significantly more effective at a higher autonomous vehicle penetration rate. Furthermore, the leading autonomous vehicles could help to mitigate traffic congestion.