Traffic Operations and Management

Hierarchies of temporally decoupled policies present a promising approach for enabling structured exploration in complex long-term planning problems. To fully achieve this approach an end-to-end training paradigm is needed. However, training these multi-level policies has had limited success due to challenges arising from interactions between the goal-assigning and goal-achieving levels within a hierarchy. In this article, we consider the policy optimization process as a multi-agent process. This allows us to draw on connections between communication and cooperation in multi-agent RL, and...

Reinforcement learning techniques can provide substantial insights into the desired behaviors of future autonomous driving systems. By optimizing for societal metrics of traffic such as increased throughput and reduced energy consumption, such methods can derive maneuvers that, if adopted by even a small portion of vehicles, may significantly improve the state of traffic for all vehicles involved. These methods, however, are hindered in practice by the difficulty of designing efficient and accurate models of traffic, as well as the challenges associated with optimizing for the behaviors of...

This chapter focuses on control of systems of conservation laws with boundary data. Problems with one or two boundaries are considered and, in particular, we focus on cases where shocks may be developed by the solution. However, for completeness we briefly discuss in Sect. 2.2 other existing results where singularities are prevented via suitable feedback controls such as in [32].

In this chapter, we introduce Hamilton-Jacobi PDEs. These PDEs are related to conservation laws and their solutions are the anti-derivative (in space) of the Entropy solutions of the corresponding conservation law, given that some assumptions are satisfied.