Reinforcement learning in urban network traffic signal control: A systematic literature review

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 domain, called as RL in NTSC or RL-NTSC for brevity. The review only targeted the network-level articles that tested the proposed methods in networks with two or more intersections. 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. We analyzed the extracted data from the included articles in the following seven categories: (i) publication and authors’ data, (ii) method identification and analysis, (iii) environment attributes and traffic simulation, (iv) application domains of RL-NTSC, (v) major first events of RL-NTSC and authors’ key statements, (vi) code availability, and (vii) evaluation. This paper provides a comprehensive view of the past 26 years of research on applying RL to NTSC. It also reveals the role of advancing deep learning methods in the revival of the research area, the rise of using non-commercial microscopic traffic simulators, a lack of interaction between traffic and transportation engineering practitioners and researchers, and a lack of proposal and creation of testbeds which can likely bring different communities together around common goals.