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Automated Vehicle (AV) control in mixed traffic, where AVs coexist with human-driven vehicles, poses significant challenges in balancing safety, efficiency, comfort, fuel efficiency, and compliance with traffic rules while capturing heterogeneous driver behavior. Traditional car-following models, such as the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM), often struggle to generalize across diverse traffic scenarios and typically do not account for fuel efficiency, motivating the use of learning-based approaches. Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown strong microscopic performance in car-following conditions, its macroscopic traffic flow characteristics remain underexplored. This study focuses on analyzing the macroscopic traffic flow characteristics and fuel efficiency of DRL-based models in mixed traffic. A Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm is implemented for AVs' control and trained using the NGSIM highway dataset, enabling realistic interaction with human-driven vehicles. Traffic performance is evaluated using the Fundamental Diagram (FD) under varying driver heterogeneity, heterogeneous time-gap penetration levels, and different shares of RL-controlled vehicles. A macroscopic level comparison of fuel efficiency between the RL-based AV model and the IDM is also conducted. Results show that traffic performance is sensitive to the distribution of safe time gaps and the proportion of RL vehicles. Transitioning from fully human-driven to fully RL-controlled traffic can increase road capacity by approximately 7.52%. Further, RL-based AVs also improve average fuel efficiency by about 28.98% at higher speeds (above 50 km/h), and by 1.86% at lower speeds (below 50 km/h) compared to the IDM. Overall, the DRL framework enhances traffic capacity and fuel efficiency without compromising safety.

Developing an autonomous vehicle control strategy for signalised intersections (SI) is one of the challenging tasks due to its inherently complex decision-making process. This study proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based longitudinal vehicle control strategy at SI. A comprehensive reward function has been formulated with a particular focus on (i) distance headway-based efficiency reward, (ii) decision-making criteria during amber light, and (iii) asymmetric acceleration/ deceleration response, along with the traditional safety and comfort criteria. This reward function has been incorporated with two popular DRL algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Soft-Actor Critic (SAC), which can handle the continuous action space of acceleration/deceleration. The proposed models have been trained on the combination of real-world leader vehicle (LV) trajectories and simulated trajectories generated using the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process. The overall performance of the proposed models has been tested using Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF) plots and compared with the real-world trajectory data. The results show that the RL models successfully maintain lower distance headway (i.e., higher efficiency) and jerk compared to human-driven vehicles without compromising safety. Further, to assess the robustness of the proposed models, we evaluated the model performance on diverse safety-critical scenarios, in terms of car-following and traffic signal compliance. Both DDPG and SAC models successfully handled the critical scenarios, while the DDPG model showed smoother action profiles compared to the SAC model. Overall, the results confirm that DRL-based longitudinal vehicle control strategy at SI can help to improve traffic safety, efficiency, and comfort.

In this work, we propose a Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCN) based scheduling algorithm for adhoc networks. In particular, we consider a generalized interference model called the \\(k\\)-tolerant conflict graph model and design an efficient approximation for the well-known Max-Weight scheduling algorithm. A notable feature of this work is that the proposed method do not require labelled data set (NP-hard to compute) for training the neural network. Instead, we design a loss function that utilises the existing greedy approaches and trains a GCN that improves the performance of greedy approaches. Our extensive numerical experiments illustrate that using our GCN approach, we can significantly (\\(4\\)-\\(20\\) percent) improve the performance of the conventional greedy approach.

We consider a Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) based scheduling algorithm for a single-hop wireless network under a realistic Signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) model for the interference. We propose two local optimization based approximation algorithms to efficiently estimate certain attempt rate parameters of CSMA called fugacities. It is known that adaptive CSMA can achieve throughput optimality by sampling feasible schedules from a Gibbs distribution, with appropriate fugacities. Unfortunately, obtaining these optimal fugacities is an NP-hard problem. Further, the existing adaptive CSMA algorithms use a stochastic gradient descent based method, which usually entails an impractically slow (exponential in the size of the network) convergence to the optimal fugacities. To address this issue, we first propose an algorithm to estimate the fugacities, that can support a given set of desired service rates. The convergence rate and the complexity of this algorithm are independent of the network size, and depend only on the neighborhood size of a link. Further, we show that the proposed algorithm corresponds exactly to performing the well-known Bethe approximation to the underlying Gibbs distribution. Then, we propose another local algorithm to estimate the optimal fugacities under a utility maximization framework, and characterize its accuracy. Numerical results indicate that the proposed methods have a good degree of accuracy, and achieve extremely fast convergence to near-optimal fugacities, and often outperform the convergence rate of the stochastic gradient descent by a few orders of magnitude.

Recent work has shown that adaptive CSMA algorithms can achieve throughput optimality. However, these adaptive CSMA algorithms assume a rather simplistic model for the wireless medium. Specifically, the interference is typically modelled by a conflict graph, and the channels are assumed to be static. In this work, we propose a distributed and adaptive CSMA algorithm under a more realistic signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) based interference model, with time-varying channels. We prove that our algorithm is throughput optimal under this generalized model. Further, we augment our proposed algorithm by using a parallel update technique. Numerical results show that our algorithm outperforms the conflict graph based algorithms, in terms of supportable throughput and the rate of convergence to steady-state.

CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access) algorithms based on Gibbs sampling can achieve throughput optimality if certain parameters called the fugacities are appropriately chosen. However, the problem of computing these fugacities is NP-hard. In this work, we derive estimates of the fugacities by using a framework called the regional free energy approximations. In particular, we derive explicit expressions for approximate fugacities corresponding to any feasible service rate vector. We further prove that our approximate fugacities are exact for the class of chordal graphs. A distinguishing feature of our work is that the regional approximations that we propose are tailored to conflict graphs with small cycles, which is a typical characteristic of wireless networks. Numerical results indicate that the fugacities obtained by the proposed method are quite accurate and significantly outperform the existing Bethe approximation based techniques.