With increased travelling needs more than ever, traffic congestion has become a major concern in most urban areas. Allocating spaces for on-street parking, further hinders traffic flow, by limiting the effective road width available for driving. With the advancement of vehicle-to-infrastructure connectivity technologies, we explore how the impact of on-street parking on traffic congestion could be minimized, by dynamically configuring on-street parking spaces. Towards that end, we formulate dynamic on-street parking space configuration as an optimization problem, and we follow a data driven approach, considering the nature of our problem. Our proposed solution comprises a two-layer multi agent reinforcement learning based framework, which is inherently scalable to large road networks. The lane level agents are responsible for deciding the optimal parking space configuration for each lane, and we introduce a novel Deep Q-learning architecture which effectively utilizes long short term memory networks and graph attention networks to capture the spatio-temporal correlations evident in the given problem. The block level agents control the actions of the lane level agents and maintain a sufficient level of parking around the block. We conduct a set of comprehensive experiments using SUMO, on both synthetic data as well as real-world data from the city of Melbourne. Our experiments show that the proposed framework could reduce the average travel time loss of vehicles significantly, reaching upto 47%, with a negligible increase in the walking distance for parking.
Advances in deep vision techniques and ubiquity of smart cameras will drive the next generation of video analytics. However, video analytics applications consume vast amounts of energy as both deep learning techniques and cameras are power-hungry. In this paper, we focus on a parking video analytics platform and propose RL-CamSleep, a deep reinforcement learning-based technique, to actuate the cameras to reduce the energy footprint while retaining the system's utility. Our key insight is that many video-analytics applications do not always need to be operational, and we can design policies to …
HOPE: A Reinforcement Learning-based Hybrid Policy Path Planner for Diverse Parking Scenarios
Department of Automation, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（自动化系，上海交通大学）；Global Institute of Future Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（未来技术全球研究院，上海交通大学）
This article proposes two different approaches to automatically create a map for valid on-street car parking spaces. For this, we use car sharing park-out events data. The first one uses spatial aggregation and the second a machine learning algorithm. For the former, we chose rasterization and road sectioning; for the latter we chose decision trees. We compare the results of these approaches and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, we show our results for a neighborhood in the city of Berlin and report a classification accuracy of 91.6\% on the original imbalanced data. Fin…
University of Hull（赫尔大学）；Northumbria University（诺森比亚大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）
In this paper, to reduce the congestion rate at the city center and increase the quality of experience (QoE) of each user, the framework of long-range autonomous valet parking (LAVP) is presented, where an Autonomous Vehicle (AV) is deployed in the city, which can pick up, drop off users at their required spots, and then drive to the car park out of city center autonomously. In this framework, we aim to minimize the overall distance of the AV, while guarantee all users are served, i.e., picking up, and dropping off users at their required spots through optimizing the path planning of the AV an…
As the number of vehicles continues to grow, parking spaces are at a premium in city streets. Additionally, due to the lack of knowledge about street parking spaces, heuristic circling the blocks not only costs drivers' time and fuel, but also increases city congestion. In the wake of recent trend to build convenient, green and energy-efficient smart cities, we rethink common techniques adopted by high-profile smart parking systems, and present a user-engaged (crowdsourcing) and sonar-based prototype to identify urban on-street parking spaces. The prototype includes an ultrasonic sensor, a GPS…
The causal relation between off-street parking and electric vehicle adoption in Scotland
Transport Research Institute（交通研究所）；Centre For Artificial Intelligence and Robotic（人工智能与机器人中心）；School of Engineering and the Built Environment, Edinburgh Napier University（爱丁堡纳皮尔大学工程与建筑环境学院）
Discovering Cyclists' Visual Preferences Through Shared Bike Trajectories and Street View Images Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Technology University（深圳技术大学）；Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
Shared Automated Vehicles (SAVs) Fleets companies are starting pilot projects nationwide. In 2020 in Fairfax Virginia it was announced the first Shared Autonomous Vehicle Fleet pilot project in Virginia. SAVs promise to improve quality of life. However, SAVs will also induce some negative externalities by generating excessive vehicle miles traveled (VMT), which leads to more congestions, energy consumption, and emissions. The excessive VMT are primarily generated via empty relocation process. Reinforcement Learning based algorithms are being researched as a possible solution to solve some of t…
University of British Columbia（英属哥伦比亚大学）；Harvard Business School（哈佛商学院）
On-street parking is convenient, but has many disadvantages: on-street spots come at the expense of other road uses such as traffic lanes, transit lanes, bike lanes, or parklets; drivers looking for parking contribute substantially to traffic congestion and hence to greenhouse gas emissions; safety is reduced both due to the fact that drivers looking for spots are more distracted than other road users and that people exiting parked cars pose a risk to cyclists. These social costs may not be worth paying when off-street parking lots are nearby and have surplus capacity. To see where this might …
DeCoR: Design and Control Co-Optimization for Urban Streets Using Reinforcement Learning
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA（田纳西大学，诺克斯维尔分校）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；University of California, Riverside, CA, USA（加州大学河滨分校）
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；JD iCity（京东智能城市）；JD Technology（京东科技）；JD Intelligent Cities Research（京东智能城市研究院）
Illegal vehicle parking is a common urban problem faced by major cities in the world, as it incurs traffic jams, which lead to air pollution and traffic accidents. The government highly relies on active human efforts to detect illegal parking events. However, such an approach is extremely ineffective to cover a large city since the police have to patrol over the entire city roads. The massive and high-quality sharing bike trajectories from Mobike offer us a unique opportunity to design a ubiquitous illegal parking detection approach, as most of the illegal parking events happen at curbsides an…
Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）；Technion Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Offline reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms learn to make decisions using a given, fixed training dataset without online data collection. This problem setting is captivating because it holds the promise of utilizing previously collected datasets without any costly or risky interaction with the environment. However, this promise also bears the drawback of this setting as the restricted dataset induces uncertainty because the agent can encounter unfamiliar sequences of states and actions that the training data did not cover. To mitigate the destructive uncertainty effects, we need to balance …
Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR（新加坡科技研究局高性能计算研究所）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
The future of mobility-as-a-Service (Maas)should embrace an integrated system of ride-hailing, street-hailing and ride-sharing with optimised intelligent vehicle routing in response to a real-time, stochastic demand pattern. We aim to optimise routing policies for a large fleet of vehicles for street-hailing services, given a stochastic demand pattern in small to medium-sized road networks. A model-based dispatch algorithm, a high performance model-free reinforcement learning based algorithm and a novel hybrid algorithm combining the benefits of both the top-down approach and the model-free re…
Hunan University（湖南大学）；State University of New York（纽约州立大学）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Agency for Science Technology and Research (A*STAR)（科学、技术与研究局（A*STAR））；Institute for Infocomm Research（资讯通信研究院）
As a new generation of Public Bicycle-sharing Systems (PBS), the dockless PBS (DL-PBS) is an important application of cyber-physical systems and intelligent transportation. How to use AI to provide efficient bicycle dispatching solutions based on dynamic bicycle rental demand is an essential issue for DL-PBS. In this paper, we propose a dynamic bicycle dispatching algorithm based on multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL-BD) to provide the optimal bicycle dispatching solution for DL-PBS. We model the DL-PBS system from the perspective of CPS and use deep learning to predict the layout of…
We present a control approach for autonomous vehicles based on deep reinforcement learning. A neural network agent is trained to map its estimated state to acceleration and steering commands given the objective of reaching a specific target state while considering detected obstacles. Learning is performed using state-of-the-art proximal policy optimization in combination with a simulated environment. Training from scratch takes five to nine hours. The resulting agent is evaluated within simulation and subsequently applied to control a full-size research vehicle. For this, the autonomous explor…
The ability to navigate from visual observations in unfamiliar environments is a core component of intelligent agents and an ongoing challenge for Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). Street View can be a sensible testbed for such RL agents, because it provides real-world photographic imagery at ground level, with diverse street appearances; it has been made into an interactive environment called StreetLearn and used for research on navigation. However, goal-driven street navigation agents have not so far been able to transfer to unseen areas without extensive retraining, and relying on simulatio…
In this paper, we consider the important problem of safe exploration in reinforcement learning. While reinforcement learning is well-suited to domains with complex transition dynamics and high-dimensional state-action spaces, an additional challenge is posed by the need for safe and efficient exploration. Traditional exploration techniques are not particularly useful for solving dangerous tasks, where the trial and error process may lead to the selection of actions whose execution in some states may result in damage to the learning system (or any other system). Consequently, when an agent begi…
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Solving robotic navigation tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging due to their sparse reward and long decision horizon nature. However, in many navigation tasks, high-level (HL) task representations, like a rough floor plan, are available. Previous work has demonstrated efficient learning by hierarchal approaches consisting of path planning in the HL representation and using sub-goals derived from the plan to guide the RL policy in the source task. However, these approaches usually neglect the complex dynamics and sub-optimal sub-goal-reaching capabilities of the robot during pla…
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学）；Intracom S.A. Telecom Solutions（Intracom电信解决方案公司）
Power sector decarbonization plays a vital role in the upcoming energy transition towards a more sustainable future. Decentralized energy resources, such as Electric Vehicles (EV) and solar photovoltaic systems (PV), are continuously integrated in residential power systems, increasing the risk of bottlenecks in power distribution networks. This paper aims to address the challenge of domestic EV charging while prioritizing clean, solar energy consumption. Real Time-of-Use tariffs are treated as a price-based Demand Response (DR) mechanism that can incentivize end-users to optimally shift EV cha…
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Light Control in Intelligent Transportation Systems
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学电气工程系）；Nokia Bell Labs（诺基亚贝尔实验室）
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Unprecedented high volumes of data are becoming available with the growth of the advanced metering infrastructure. These are expected to benefit planning and operation of the future power system, and to help the customers transition from a passive to an active role. In this paper, we explore for the first time in the smart grid context the benefits of using Deep Reinforcement Learning, a hybrid type of methods that combines Reinforcement Learning with Deep Learning, to perform on-line optimization of schedules for building energy management systems. The learning procedure was explored using tw…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）
Online reinforcement learning is concerned with training an agent on-the-fly via dynamic interaction with the environment. Here, due to the specifics of the application, it is not generally possible to perform long pre-training, as it is commonly done in off-line, model-free approaches, which are akin to dynamic programming. Such applications may be found more frequently in industry, rather than in pure digital fields, such as cloud services, video games, database management, etc., where reinforcement learning has been demonstrating success. Online reinforcement learning, in contrast, is more …
University of Oslo（奥斯陆大学）；Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering（Simula大都会数字工程中心）
The power consumption of households has been constantly growing over the years. To cope with this growth, intelligent management of the consumption profile of the households is necessary, such that the households can save the electricity bills, and the stress to the power grid during peak hours can be reduced. However, implementing such a method is challenging due to the existence of randomness in the electricity price and the consumption of the appliances. To address this challenge, we employ a model-free method for the households which works with limited information about the uncertain facto…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
VALAN is a lightweight and scalable software framework for deep reinforcement learning based on the SEED RL architecture. The framework facilitates the development and evaluation of embodied agents for solving grounded language understanding tasks, such as Vision-and-Language Navigation and Vision-and-Dialog Navigation, in photo-realistic environments, such as Matterport3D and Google StreetView. We have added a minimal set of abstractions on top of SEED RL allowing us to generalize the architecture to solve a variety of other RL problems. In this article, we will describe VALAN's software abst…
This paper presents our method for enabling a UAV quadrotor, equipped with a monocular camera, to autonomously avoid collisions with obstacles in unstructured and unknown indoor environments. When compared to obstacle avoidance in ground vehicular robots, UAV navigation brings in additional challenges because the UAV motion is no more constrained to a well-defined indoor ground or street environment. Horizontal structures in indoor and outdoor environments like decorative items, furnishings, ceiling fans, sign-boards, tree branches etc., also become relevant obstacles unlike those for ground v…
The deployment of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) poses considerable challenges and unique opportunities for the design and management of future urban road infrastructure. In light of this disruptive transformation, the Right-Of-Way (ROW) composition of road space has the potential to be renewed. Design approaches and intelligent control models have been proposed to address this problem, but we lack an operational framework that can dynamically generate ROW plans for AVs and pedestrians in response to real-time demand. Based on microscopic traffic simulation, this study explores Reinforcement Learni…
Large Vision Model-Enhanced Digital Twin with Deep Reinforcement Learning for User Association and Load Balancing in Dynamic Wireless Networks
National Mobile Communications Research Lab, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China（南京东南大学国家移动通信研究中心）；Pervasive Communication Research Center, Purple Mountain Laboratories, Nanjing 211111, China（南京紫金山实验室 pervasive 通信研究中心）
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
Recent studies demonstrated the vulnerability of control policies learned through deep reinforcement learning against adversarial attacks, raising concerns about the application of such models to risk-sensitive tasks such as autonomous driving. Threat models for these demonstrations are limited to (1) targeted attacks through real-time manipulation of the agent's observation, and (2) untargeted attacks through manipulation of the physical environment. The former assumes full access to the agent's states/observations at all times, while the latter has no control over attack outcomes. This paper…
Thapar Institute of Eng. & Tech.（塔帕尔工程与技术学院）；Bournemouth University（伯恩茅斯大学）
Simulation environments are good for learning different driving tasks like lane changing, parking or handling intersections etc. in an abstract manner. However, these simulation environments often restrict themselves to operate under conservative interaction behavior amongst different vehicles. But, as we know, real driving tasks often involve very high risk scenarios where other drivers often don't behave in the expected sense. There can be many reasons for this behavior like being tired or inexperienced. The simulation environment doesn't take this information into account while training the…
As a distributed learning approach, federated learning trains a shared learning model over distributed datasets while preserving the training data privacy. We extend the application of federated learning to parking management and introduce FedParking in which Parking Lot Operators (PLOs) collaborate to train a long short-term memory model for parking space estimation without exchanging the raw data. Furthermore, we investigate the management of Parked Vehicle assisted Edge Computing (PVEC) by FedParking. In PVEC, different PLOs recruit PVs as edge computing nodes for offloading services throug…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；MIT（麻省理工学院）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）
Foundation models pretrained on diverse data at scale have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in a wide range of vision and language tasks. When such models are deployed in real world environments, they inevitably interface with other entities and agents. For example, language models are often used to interact with human beings through dialogue, and visual perception models are used to autonomously navigate neighborhood streets. In response to these developments, new paradigms are emerging for training foundation models to interact with other agents and perform long-term reasoning. These …
Agent-Controller Representations: Principled Offline RL with Rich Exogenous Information
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Amii（阿尔伯塔机器智能研究所）；University of Montreal（蒙特利尔大学）；Quebec AI Institute（魁北克人工智能研究所）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Meta；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
