Reinforcement Learning in Urban Network Traffic Signal Control: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Improvement of traffic signal control (TSC) efficiency has been found to lead to improved urban transportation and enhanced quality of life. Recently, the use of reinforcement learning (RL) in various areas of TSC has gained significant traction; thus, we conducted a systematic literature review as a systematic, comprehensive, and reproducible review to dissect all the existing research that applied RL in the network-level TSC (NTSC) domain. The review only targeted the network-level articles that tested the proposed methods in networks with two or more intersections. We used natural language processing to define the search strings and searched Google Scholar, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Springer Link, and Science Direct databases. This review covers 160 peer-reviewed articles from 30 countries published from 1994 to March 2020. The goal of this study is to provide the research community with statistical and conceptual knowledge, summarize existence evidence, characterize RL applications in NTSC domains, explore all applied methods and major first events in the defined scope, and identify areas for further research based on the explored research problems in current research.