It's nice that this worked without need for communication between cars.
This should be a built-in feature of adaptive cruise control in regular cars.
This is an interesting idea, but I'm sceptical of the advantages.
"there is more Co2" is valid for cars burning fuel. But as soon as you recuperate (even in a hybrid) you might only have a fraction of the losses any more. Adjusting the speed more aggressively is possible, without breaking, with little loss. I totally agree that stop-and-go is annoying, but looking into the future, Co2 should not be a reason for the vehicles in 5-10 years when the research can be rolled out.
Is "slamming the brakes" still happening? Around here you have dynamic speed limit signs on the highway. In high traffic everybody then goes a little slower, but smoothly.
I suspect that if a road is loaded beyond max throughput, this method will also fail, even harder. Let me explain: I remember a graph from communications theory. With improving error correcting codes in transmission, you can get a clean signal for even worse channel conditions. But once it fails you will not have a signal any more. The better the code, the steeper the cutoff. Whereas without in FM radio, the degrade in user experience is also gradual.
So the analogy goes like this: I would expect that you could possibly load the road with another 10% more vehicles. But if one day you have 15% more, the blockage will be even worse than before. Could be worth simulating throughput for various loading situations.
Apologies for people who've already seen this (it's pretty old and comes round fairly frequently on HN), but for those previously unaware, http://trafficwaves.org/ is one of the best sites digging into the phenomenon from an "educated layman's" perspective.
Great exposition on that page .. with the animations clearly explaining the phenomenon [ yet not preventing reading ]
I expect to see many small startups using RL to solve realworld B2B problems, of this flavor, that were previously too-hard to tackle.
Describing human intelligences as self-drivers on the highway of progress, one may build the following dictionary with the help of OP's graph
Traffic density -> urban pop. density
Traffic flow -> rate of new ideas productively implemented
Partial observability -> democracy*
Reinforcement learning -> augmenting individual expression
Oxygen/lithium -> money
It's so refreshing to see real solutions to transportation problems instead of pie in the sky "burn it all down and start from scratch" thinking.
Does the really need reinforcement learning? It seems like something that classical controller should be able to do.
Are the cars used ICE? I would think a electric vehicle would be better for the environment, and less susceptible to fluctuations in gas prices.
If you used EV's you also have a fleet or high density energy storage when not in use
Pretty interesting. I’m surprised that the throughput drops with traffic, especially all the way to zero in the first plot.
Definitely frustrating to drive through these and great point that it’s bad for efficiency.
How do lane changes affect this work?
There's a certain satisfaction in anticipating these stop and go waves while driving, and timing it so that you catch the tail just as it starts moving again - the goal being to use the brake as little as possible and ideally only need to adjust acceleration. I don't really get why people feel the need to repeatedly accelerate up and then slam on the brakes, when leaving reasonable gaps makes everything go smoother.