Reinforcement Learning-Based Lane Change Decision for CAVs in Mixed Traffic Flow under Low Visibility Conditions

Abstract

As an important stage in the development of autonomous driving, mixed traffic conditions, consisting of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and human-driven vehicles (HDVs), have attracted more and more attention. In fact, the randomness of human-driven vehicles (HDV) is the largest challenge for connected autonomous vehicles (CAV) to make reasonable decisions, especially in lane change scenarios. In this paper, we propose the problem of lane change decisions for CAV in low visibility and mixed traffic conditions for the first time. First, we consider the randomness of HDV in this environment and construct a finite state machine (FSM) model. Then, this study develops a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) for describing the problem of lane change. In addition, we use the modified deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) to solve the problem and get the optimal lane change decision in this environment. The reward designing takes the comfort, safety and efficiency of the vehicle into account, and the introduction of transfer learning accelerates the adaptation of CAV to the randomness of HDV. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted. The results show that, compared with the original DDPG, the modified DDPG has a faster convergence velocity. The strategy learned by the modified DDPG can complete the lane change in most of the scenarios. The comparison between the modified DDPG and the rule-based decisions indicates that the modified DDPG has a stronger adaptability to this special environment and can grasp more lane change opportunities.