Objective-aware Traffic Simulation via Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Objective-aware Traffic Simulation via Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Guanjie Zheng, Hanyang Liu, Kai Xu, Zhenhui Li

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3771-3777. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/519

Traffic simulators act as an essential component in the operating and planning of transportation systems. Conventional traffic simulators usually employ a calibrated physical car-following model to describe vehicles' behaviors and their interactions with traffic environment. However, there is no universal physical model that can accurately predict the pattern of vehicle's behaviors in different situations. A fixed physical model tends to be less effective in a complicated environment given the non-stationary nature of traffic dynamics. In this paper, we formulate traffic simulation as an inverse reinforcement learning problem, and propose a parameter sharing adversarial inverse reinforcement learning model for dynamics-robust simulation learning. Our proposed model is able to imitate a vehicle's trajectories in the real world while simultaneously recovering the reward function that reveals the vehicle's true objective which is invariant to different dynamics. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show the superior performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods and its robustness to variant dynamics of traffic.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Transportation
Machine Learning Applications: Applications of Reinforcement Learning
Data Mining: Mining Spatial, Temporal Data