Dynamic Electronic Toll Collection via Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning with Edge-Based Graph Convolutional Networks

Dynamic Electronic Toll Collection via Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning with Edge-Based Graph Convolutional Networks

Wei Qiu, Haipeng Chen, Bo An

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 4568-4574. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/635

Over the past decades, Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) systems have been proved the capability of alleviating traffic congestion in urban areas. Dynamic Electronic Toll Collection (DETC) was recently proposed to further improve the efficiency of ETC, where tolls are dynamically set based on traffic dynamics. However, computing the optimal DETC scheme is computationally difficult and existing approaches are limited to small scale or partial road networks, which significantly restricts the adoption of DETC. To this end, we propose a novel multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) approach for DETC. We make several key contributions: i) an enhancement over the state-of-the-art RL-based method with a deep neural network representation of the policy and value functions and a temporal difference learning framework to accelerate the update of target values, ii) a novel edge-based graph convolutional neural network (eGCN) to extract the spatio-temporal correlations of the road network state features, iii) a novel cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) which divides the whole road network into partitions according to their geographic and economic characteristics and trains a tolling agent for each partition. Experimental results show that our approach can scale up to realistic-sized problems with robust performance and significantly outperform the state-of-the-art method.
Keywords:
Machine Learning Applications: Applications of Reinforcement Learning
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Transportation