Improved deep reinforcement learning for car-following decision-making

• Accuracy improvement of Car-following (CF) model has attracted much attention in recent years. Although a few studies incorporate deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to describe CF behaviors, proper design of reward function is still an intractable problem. This study improves the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) car-following model with stacked denoising autoencoders (SDAE), and proposes a data-driven reward representation function, which quantifies the implicit interaction between ego vehicle and preceding vehicle in car-following process. The experimental results demonstrate that DDPG-SDAE model has superior ability of imitating driving behavior: (1) validating effectiveness of the reward representation method with low deviation of trajectory; (2) demonstrating generalization ability on two different trajectory datasets (HighD and SPMD); (3) adapting to three traffic scenarios clustered by a dynamic time warping distance based k-medoids method. Compared with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and intelligent driver model (IDM), DDPG-SDAE model shows better performance on the deviation of speed and relative distance. This study demonstrates superiority of a novel reward extraction method fusing SDAE into DDPG algorithm and provides inspiration for developing driving decision-making model. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Samhällsbyggnadsteknik -- Transportteknik och logistik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Civil Engineering -- Transport Systems and Logistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Car-following model

Deep reinforcement learning

Driving behavior imitation

Stacked denoising autoencoders

Behavioral research

Decision making

Learning systems

Recurrent neural networks

Auto encoders

Car-following modeling

De-noising

Deterministics

Driving behaviour

Policy gradient

Reinforcement learnings

Stacked denoising autoencoder

Reinforcement learning

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)