Abstract Bus bunching is a long-standing problem in transit operation and ruining the regularity of transit service. In a typical urban transit network setting of multiple lines with a shared corridor, bus bunching becomes more frequent as there is more uncertainty inside the shared corridor. While multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been a promising scheme for learning efficient control policy in a multi-agent system, few studies have explored its applicability in multi-line transit control scenarios. In this study, we focus on a basic transit network where there are two bus lines with a shared corridor. An efficient MARL framework is proposed to learn multi-line bus holding control to avoid bus bunching. Specifically, we design observation and reward functions that incorporate multi-line information. In addition, a preference weights producer is introduced to update the objective weights towards a good trajectory evaluation during daily transit operation. In this way, we handle the multi-objective issue in multi-line control. In experimental studies, we validate the superiority of the method in real-world bus lines. Results show that the state and reward augmented with multi-line information benefit MARL in multi-line bus control. Besides, by updating preference weights towards less passenger waiting time, the regularity of transit service is further improved.

    Highlights We are the first to design a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for multi-line bus control with shared corridor. We address the multi-objective problem of multi-line control in multi-agent reinforcement learning. Extensive experimental analyses are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed method.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Multi-objective multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to reduce bus bunching for multiline services with a shared corridor


    Contributors:
    Wang, Jiawei (author) / Sun, Lijun (author)


    Publication date :

    2023-08-15




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




    Multiline Bus Bunching Control via Vehicle Substitution

    Petit, Antoine / Lei, Chao / Ouyang, Yanfeng | Elsevier | 2019



    Multiline holding based control for lines merging to a shared transit corridor

    Laskaris, Georgios / Cats, Oded / Jenelius, Erik et al. | Taylor & Francis Verlag | 2019


    Traffic signal priority control based on shared experience multi‐agent deep reinforcement learning

    Wang, Zhiwen / Yang, Kangkang / Li, Long et al. | Wiley | 2023

    Free access

    Traffic signal priority control based on shared experience multi‐agent deep reinforcement learning

    Zhiwen Wang / Kangkang Yang / Long Li et al. | DOAJ | 2023

    Free access