An Intelligent IoT Based Traffic Light Management System: Deep Reinforcement Learning

Traffic is one of the indispensable problems of modern societies, which leads to undesirable consequences such as time wasting and greater possibility of accidents. Adaptive Traffic Signal Control (ATSC), as a key part of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), plays a key role in reducing traffic congestion by real-time adaptation to dynamic traffic conditions. Moreover, these systems are integrated with Internet of Things (IoT) devices. IoT can lead to easy implementation of traffic management systems. Recently, the combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the IoT has attracted the attention of many researchers and can process large amounts of data that are suitable for solving complex real-world problems about traffic control. In this paper, we worked on the real-world scenario of Shiraz City, which currently does not use any intelligent method and works based on fixed-time traffic signal scheduling. We applied IoT approaches and AI techniques to control traffic lights more efficiently, which is an essential part of the ITS. Specifically, sensors such as surveillance cameras were used to capture real-time traffic information for the intelligent traffic signal control system. In fact, an intelligent traffic signal control system is provided by utilizing distributed Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) and applying the traffic data of adjacent intersections along with local information. By using MARL, our goal was to improve the overall traffic of six signalized junctions of Shiraz City in Iran. We conducted numerical simulations for two synthetic intersections by simulated data and for a real-world map of Shiraz City with real-world traffic data received from the transportation and municipality traffic organization and compared it with the traditional system running in Shiraz. The simulation results show that our proposed approach performs more efficiently than the fixed-time traffic signal control scheduling implemented in Shiraz in terms of average vehicle queue lengths and waiting times at intersections.