Reinforcement Learning for Robust Advisories Under Driving Compliance Errors

There has been considerable interest in recent years regarding how a small fraction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) can mitigate traffic congestion. However, the reality of vehicle-based congestion mitigation remains elusive, due to challenges of cost, technology maturity, and regulation. As a result, recent works have investigated the necessity of autonomy by exploring driving advisory systems. Such early works have made simplifying assumptions such as perfect driver compliance. This work relaxes this assumption, focusing on compliance errors caused by physical limitations of human drivers, in particular, response delay and speed deviation. These compliance errors introduce significant unpredictability into traffic systems, complicating the design of real-time driving advisories aimed at stabilizing traffic flow. Our analysis reveals that performance degradation increases sharply under compliance errors, highlighting the associated difficulties. To address this challenge, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on an action-persistent Markov decision process (MDP) combined with domain randomization, designed for robust coarse-grained driving policies. This approach allows driving policies to effectively manage the cumulative impacts of compliance errors by generating various scenarios and corresponding traffic conditions during training. We show that in comparison to prior RL-based work which did not consider compliance errors, our policies achieve up to 2.2 times improvement in average speed over non-robust training. In addition, analytical results validate the experiment results, highlighting the benefits of the proposed framework. Overall, this paper advocates the necessity of incorporating human driver compliance errors in the development of RL-based advisory systems, achieving more effective and resilient traffic management solutions.