URB - Urban Routing Benchmark for RL-equipped Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Ahmet Onur Akman, Anastasia Psarou, Michał Hoffmann, Łukasz Gorczyca, Lukasz Kowalski, Paweł Gora, Grzegorz Jamróz, Rafal Kucharski

Keywords: Route choice, Reinforcement learning, MARL, benchmark, traffic, autonomous vehicles, SUMO

TL;DR: We introduce URB, a standardized benchmark for evaluating MARL in urban routing with autonomous vehicles across 29 real-world traffic networks, revealing that current state-of-the-art algorithms struggle to outperform humans and scale effectively.

Abstract: Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) promise to reduce congestion in future urban networks, potentially by optimizing their routing decisions. Unlike for human drivers, these decisions can be made with collective, data-driven policies, developed using machine learning algorithms. Reinforcement learning (RL) can facilitate the development of such collective routing strategies, yet standardized and realistic benchmarks are missing. To that end, we present $\texttt{URB}$: Urban Routing Benchmark for RL-equipped Connected Autonomous Vehicles. $\texttt{URB}$ is a comprehensive benchmarking environment that unifies evaluation across 29 real-world traffic networks paired with realistic demand patterns. $\texttt{URB}$ comes with a catalog of predefined tasks, multi-agent RL (MARL) algorithm implementations, three baseline methods, domain-specific performance metrics, and a modular configuration scheme. Our results show that, despite the lengthy and costly training, state-of-the-art MARL algorithms rarely outperformed humans. The experimental results reported in this paper initiate the first leaderboard for MARL in large-scale urban routing optimization. They reveal that current approaches struggle to scale, emphasizing the urgent need for advancements in this domain.

Dataset URL: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/ukaszgorczyca/urb-networks

Code URL: https://github.com/COeXISTENCE-PROJECT/URB

Primary Area: AL/ML Datasets & Benchmarks for social sciences (e.g. climate, health, life sciences, physics, social sciences)

Submission Number: 977