Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for V2X Managed Intersections of Connected Vehicles

Intersections are major bottlenecks for road traffic, as well as the origin of many accidents. Efficient management of traffic at intersections is required to ensure both safety and efficiency. Yet, the traditional solutions (static signs, traffic lights) are limited in their efficiency as they consider the flow of vehicles and not the vehicles at the microscopic level. By using inter-vehicular communication of connected vehicles, recent works have shown the possibility to have a great increase in the number of evacuated vehicles thanks to the possibility to give an individual right-of-way directly to each vehicle. In this context of intersections of cooperative vehicles, the scheduling of this right-of-way in order to maximize the throughput of the intersection is still a challenging task, with regard to the hybrid and dynamic aspects of the problem. In this paper, we propose an approach based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to efficiently distribute the right-of-way to each vehicle. A Markov Decision Process model of intersections of cooperative vehicles, enabling the application of DRL, is proposed. The performance of the DRL-based scheduling is then compared with classic traffic lights, and with two state-of-the-art cooperative scheduling policies, showing the benefits of the approach (increase of the flow, reduction of CO2 emissions).