Book Your Green Wave: Exploiting Navigation Information for Intelligent Traffic Signal Control

Abstract

Traffic congestion alleviation around intersections has been a growing challenge, and a competent traffic signal control scheme plays a pivotal role in intelligent transportation systems. Recent studies using deep reinforcement learning techniques have shown promising results for traffic signal control, but they only focus on extracting features from traffic conditions of isolated or adjacent intersections. In this work, we employed navigation information for traffic signal control, greatly enriching the features for traffic signal control with deep reinforcement learning. In addition, we are the first to propose a novel scheme DeepNavi to exploit the temporal-spatial relations from numerous navigation routes and extract dynamic real-time and future traffic features. We tested our scheme on a challenging real-world traffic dataset with 16 intersections in a residential district of Hangzhou, China. Extensive experiments were conducted and the results demonstrated that our DeepNavi scheme achieves superior performance over five popular and state-of-the-art baseline methods on different metrics, including queue length, speed, travel time and accumulative waiting time. In addition, with our method, vehicles suffer the least red lights and enjoy the most green waves, which further validates that our scheme greatly relieves the congestion and provides excellent experience for drivers. Simulations with different penetration levels of navigation routes showed that even with only part of navigation routes available in the traffic network, our scheme can obtain superior performance, further demonstrating the effectiveness and feasibility of DeepNavi.