Stability-Preserving Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneity-Aware Composite Max-Pressure Traffic Signal Control

Overview & Synopsis

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a flexible mechanism for adapting traffic signal control to heterogeneous traffic and sensing conditions, but directly learned signal actions do not automatically inherit the analytical properties of structured traffic-control methods. This paper proposes Com-MP, a theory-guided RL framework that learns a context-dependent composition of multiple max-pressure (MP) control preferences while retaining decentralized MP phase selection. The learned policy adapts the relative influence of constituent MP formulations according to local traffic and sensing conditions, allowing data-driven adaptation to operate within a structured traffic-control framework. We show that such intersection-specific and time-varying composition preserves strong queue stability for every demand in the strictly stabilizable region under any admissible non-anticipative composition policy, thereby separating the performance-adaptation role of learning from the stability property of the underlying controller. In a representative implementation combining detector-supported queue-based MP and connected-vehicle-supported travel-time MP, experiments on a real-world 45-intersection network show that Com-MP reduces average delay by 15.6\% and 8.6\% relative to the two constituent controllers, respectively, and by about 7.0\% relative to the best fixed composition. The learned composition responds systematically to local traffic and sensing conditions, remains effective under heterogeneous and degraded sensing, and can be transferred without retraining to an unseen network with an average delay only 2.4\% higher than that of a policy trained directly on the target network. These results show how learning-based adaptation can be introduced within a stability-preserving traffic-control structure, providing a theory-guided pathway toward trustworthy learning-enabled traffic signal control.