An adversarial diverse deep ensemble approach for surrogate‐based traffic signal optimization

Surrogate-based traffic signal optimization (TSO) is a computationally efficient alternative to simulation-based TSO. By replacing the simulation-based objective function, a surrogate model can quickly identify solutions by searching for extreme points on its response surface. As a popular surrogate model, the ensemble of multiple diverse deep learning models can approximate complicated systems with a strong generalizability. However, existing ensemble methods barely focus on strengthening the prediction of extreme points, which we found can be realized by further diversifying base learners in the ensemble. The study proposes an adversarial diverse ensemble (ADE) method for online TSO with limited computational resources, comprising two stages: In the offline stage, base extractors are diversified with unlabeled data by a designed adversarial diversity training algorithm; in the online stage, base predictors are trained in parallel with limited labeled data, and the ensemble then serves as the surrogate model to search for solutions iteratively for TSO. First, it is demonstrated that the prediction accuracy on extreme points, and associated solution quality, can be constantly improved with base learners’ diversity enhanced by ADE. Case studies of TSO conducted on a four-intersection arterial further demonstrate the superior solution quality and computational efficiency of the ADE surrogate model in a wide range of traffic scenarios. Moreover, a large-scale online TSO experiment under dynamic traffic demand proves ADE's effectiveness in practical applications.