arXiv:2605.10257cs.AI2026-05

用分层强化学习提升铁路调度自动化,显著改善列车准点率与网络鲁棒性。

Towards Autonomous Railway Operations: A Semi-Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to the Vehicle Rescheduling Problem

论文配图:Towards Autonomous Railway Operations: A Semi-Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to the Vehicle Rescheduling Problem
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 分层设计:将调度与路径决策分离,让模型专注不同任务
  • 实测可处理7至80列列车,准点率近翻倍,死锁率低于5%
  • 适合铁路智能调度系统研发者与交通优化工程师参考

铁路运营中应对突发扰动是重大挑战。随着客流密度上升与基础设施限制加剧,车辆调度与路径规划问题(VRSP)变得愈发复杂,难以实时可靠求解。尽管运筹学方法广泛应用,但多数调度仍依赖人工经验,因问题具有指数级组合复杂性。强化学习在多智能体协同方面展现潜力,但现有方法性能常不及传统运筹学手段,且在高密度铁路网中难以扩展。本文从机器学习视角提出一种面向铁路运营约束的半层级强化学习框架,通过分离调度与路径决策的动作和观测空间,使策略在不同决策范围内专业化,缓解稀疏调度动作与频繁路径更新之间的不平衡。在Flatland-RL模拟器上,于五个难度等级、50组随机种子下进行评估,覆盖7至80列列车。结果表明,相比启发式基线与单体强化学习,该方法显著提升协同能力、资源利用率与鲁棒性,列车抵达目的地数量几乎翻倍,死锁率保持在5%以下,并能自适应地排序、延迟或取消列车以应对严重拥堵。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Managing disruptions in railway traffic management is a major challenge. Rising traffic density and infrastructure limits increase complexity, making the Vehicle Routing and Scheduling Problem (VRSP) difficult to solve reliably and in real time. While Operational Research (OR) methods are widely used, most dispatching still relies on human expertise due to the problem's exponential combinatorial complexity. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained attention for its potential in multi-agent coordination, but existing RL approaches often underperform OR methods and struggle to scale in dense rail networks. This paper addresses this gap from a machine learning perspective by introducing a semi-hierarchical RL formulation tailored to operational railway constraints. The method separates dispatching from routing through dedicated action and observation spaces, enabling policies to specialise in distinct decision scopes and addressing the imbalance between rare dispatch decisions and frequent routing updates. The approach is evaluated on the Flatland-RL simulator across five difficulty levels and 50 random seeds, with 7 to 80 trains. Results show substantially improved coordination, resource utilisation, and robustness compared with heuristic baselines and monolithic RL, nearly doubling the number of trains reaching their destinations, while keeping deadlock rates below 5% and adaptively sequencing, delaying, or cancelling trains under heavy congestion.

铁路调度强化学习多智能体

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