FECO: An Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Fuel-Economic Traffic Signal Control Scheme

Vehicle fuel efficiency (VFE) has a pivotal role in solving energy shortage issue due to the increasing global demand for energy. The high frequency of go-stop movements and long waiting times at intersections significantly reduce the VFE. Such negative impacts are particularly severe when the traffic flows are regulated by poorly designed traffic signal control. Existing works have successfully applied deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques to improve the efficiency of traffic signal control. However, to the best of our knowledge, few studies have explored traffic signal control for VFE through eco-driving techniques. To fill the gap, we propose a DRL-based fuel-economic traffic signal control for improving vehicle fuel efficiency. Briefly, we adopt the DRL-technique to develop an agent that can efficiently control traffic signals based on real-time traffic information at intersections, and adjust speed profiles for approaching vehicles to smooth traffic flows. We tested our method on both synthetic traffic dataset and real-world traffic dataset from surveillance cameras in Toronto. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method surpassed the performance of both pure eco-driving and pure traffic signal control techniques by significantly reducing vehicle fuel consumption and improving the efficiency of traffic signal control.