Parallel System-Based Predictive Control for Traffic Signals in Large-Scale Road Networks

This paper proposes a parallel system-based predictive control (PPC) method to address the problem of active traffic signal control in large-scale urban road networks. The method leverages simulated artificial transportation systems to infer the short-term future operating states of the real transportation system. During the inference process, an efficient predictive learning-based multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm is employed to optimize the cooperative control policies. The optimized policies are then deployed to the real transportation system at fixed intervals to adapt to the real-time and dynamic traffic flow. Experimental results demonstrate that PPC outperforms traditional traffic control methods and some multi-agent RL benchmarks in large-scale road network control scenarios with nearly two hundred intersections, showcasing superior generalization capabilities.