Decision-Making Policy for Autonomous Vehicles on Highways Using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) Method

Automated driving (AD) is a new technology that aims to mitigate traffic accidents and enhance driving efficiency. This study presents a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method for autonomous vehicles that can safely and efficiently handle highway overtaking scenarios. The first step is to create a highway traffic environment where the agent can be guided safely through surrounding vehicles. A hierarchical control framework is then provided to manage high-level driving decisions and low-level control commands, such as speed and acceleration. Next, a special DRL-based method called deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) is used to derive decision strategies for use on the highway. The performance of the DDPG algorithm is compared with that of the DQN and PPO algorithms, and the results are evaluated. The simulation results show that the DDPG algorithm can effectively and safely handle highway traffic tasks.