irace + SUMO: Reliable simulation-optimization of traffic lights in a real-world city

Javier Ferrer, Manuel López-Ibáñez, and Enrique Alba. Reliable simulation-optimization of traffic lights in a real-world city. Applied Soft Computing, 78:697–711, 2019. doi:10.1016/j.asoc.2019.03.016
[ bibtex ]

Software versions used in the paper:

• irace 3.0
• SUMO 0.22.0
• Perl 5

Installation

1. Install irace (>=3.0): https://cran.r-project.org/package=irace

2. Install SUMO (>= 0.22.0): https://www.eclipse.org/sumo/

   IMPORTANT: The sumo executable must be in the PATH, otherwise sumo-wrapper will not find it!

3. Compile sumo-wrapper:

   make all -C src/sumo-wrapper/code
   

4. The files ./irace/target-runner-rel and ./irace/target-runner-abs require Perl 5.

5. The setup is designed for GNU/Linux. It may be possible to make it work in Windows or OSX, but you may need to rewrite some of the scripts.

Execution

Look at scenarios in src/irace/, choose one, for example scenario-abs-repjavier-first2new0confs10.txt. Then run (removing scenario-):

    $ run.sh abs-repjavier-first2new0confs10 2

This will create a directory ./execdir-2 with the results of irace.

Overview

1. run.sh will call both ./irace/target-runner-rel and ./irace/target-runner-abs using the traffic-light file instance defined in run.sh to create ./irace/parameters-rel.txt and ./irace/parameters-abs.txt. An example of traffic-light instance is src/sumo-wrapper/instanceFiles/malagaChica.txt. You can regenerate this file using:

    ./src/sumo-wrapper/code/genInstanceFile ./instances/malagaChica/ malagaChica 4200

2. run.sh will call irace which calls either ./irace/target-runner-rel or ./irace/target-runner-abs (defined by the scenario targetRunner). Let's assume it is ./irace/target-runner-rel.

3. ./irace/target-runner-rel will call ./src/sumo-wrapper/code/sumo-wrapper which calls sumo

4. sumo will use the files in src/sumo-wrapper/instanceFiles/ src/sumo-wrapper/instances/. Please read src/sumo-wrapper/README.txt

5. Instance files for irace are defined in malagaChica-train.txt and malagaChica-test.txt. The *.rou.xml files defined there are the routes of the cars and each file describes a traffic scenario. As mentioned in the paper, they were generated by Daniel Stolfi from sensor data and using the Flow Generator Algorithm (FGA) [27]. They are specific to a network file and cannot be re-used for a different network.