Self Healing of a Mixed Autonomy Traffic System Using Reinforcement Learning and Attention

Safia Fatima, Kai Olav Ellefsen, Leon Moonen

Abstract: As urban traffic becomes increasingly complex with the integration of connected and autonomous vehicles alongside human-driven vehicles, there is a critical need for adaptive traffic management systems capable of self-healing in response to disruptions. This paper introduces TS2RLA (“Traffic System Recovery using Reinforcement Learning and Attention”), a novel framework for self-healing in mixed-autonomy traffic systems by combining deep reinforcement learning with an attention mechanism to optimize traffic flow and recover from faults in various scenarios in a mixed-autonomy traffic environment. We evaluated TS2RLA in four complex traffic scenarios: bottleneck, figure-eight, grid, and merge. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over the baseline model, showing an average of 86.74% reduction in crashes, 71% improvement in speed and traffic throughput, and robust performance under diverse and complex traffic conditions. Moreover, our experiments show that TS2RLA leads to a significant reduction in CO2 emissions and fuel consumption. TS2RLA’s attention-based approach shows particular benefits in bottleneck and figure-eight scenarios, demonstrating its ability to adapt to complex, multi-factor traffic situations. For scenarios that TS2RLA had not been trained on before, it performs even more favorably than the baseline, with a 96.8% crash reduction and 95.3% throughput improvement. This shows its ability to adapt effectively to new traffic conditions. Overall, we conclude that TS2RLA could significantly improve the safety, efficiency, and capacity of real-world traffic systems, particularly in dynamic urban environments. As such, our work contributes to the field of intelligent transportation systems by offering a versatile self-healing framework capable of managing the complexities of mixed-autonomy traffic.

External IDs:doi:10.1109/ojits.2025.3606539