Boosted Genetic Algorithm using Machine Learning for traffic control optimization

Traffic control optimization is a challenging task for various traffic centers around the world and the majority of existing approaches focus only on developing adaptive methods under normal (recurrent) traffic conditions. Optimizing the control plans when severe incidents occur still remains an open problem, especially when a high number of lanes or entire intersections are affected. This paper aims at tackling this problem and presents a novel methodology for optimizing the traffic signal timings in signalized urban intersections, under non-recurrent traffic incidents. With the purpose of producing fast and reliable decisions, we combine the fast running Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and the reliable Genetic Algorithms (GA) into a single optimization framework. As a benchmark, we first start with deploying a typical GA algorithm by considering the phase duration as the decision variable and the objective function to minimize the total travel time in the network. We fine tune the GA for crossover, mutation, fitness calculation and obtain the optimal parameters. Secondly, we train various machine learning regression models to predict the total travel time of the studied traffic network, and select the best performing regressor which we further hyper-tune to find the optimal training parameters. Lastly, we propose a new algorithm BGA-ML combining the GA algorithm and the extreme-gradient decision-tree, which is the best performing regressor, together in a single optimization framework. Comparison and results show that the new BGA-ML is much faster than the original GA algorithm and can be successfully applied under non-recurrent incident conditions.

Traffic signal control optimization under severe incident conditions using Genetic Algorithm

Traffic control optimization is a challenging task for various traffic centres in the world and majority of approaches focus only on applying adaptive methods under normal (recurrent) traffic conditions. But optimizing the control plans when severe incidents occur still remains a hard topic to address, especially if a high number of lanes or entire intersections are affected. This paper aims at tackling this problem and presents a novel methodology for optimizing the traffic signal timings in signalized urban intersections, under non-recurrent traffic incidents. The approach relies on deploying genetic algorithms (GA) by considering the phase durations as decision variables and the objective function to minimize as the total travel time in the network. Firstly, we develop the GA algorithm on a signalized testbed network under recurrent traffic conditions, with the purpose of fine-tuning the algorithm for crossover, mutation, fitness calculation, and obtain the optimal phase durations. Secondly, we apply the optimal signal timings previously found under severe incidents affecting the traffic flow in the network but without any further optimization. Lastly, we further apply the GA optimization under incident conditions and show that our approach improved the total travel time by almost 40.76%.