MARL-Ped: A multi-agent reinforcement learning based framework to simulate pedestrian groups
Abstract Pedestrian simulation is complex because there are different levels of behavior modeling. At the lowest level, local interactions between agents occur; at the middle level, strategic and tactical behaviors appear like overtakings or route choices; and at the highest level path-planning is necessary. The agent-based pedestrian simulators either focus on a specific level (mainly in the lower one) or define strategies like the layered architectures to independently manage the different behavioral levels. In our Multi-Agent Reinforcement-Learning-based Pedestrian simulation framework (MARL-Ped) the situation is addressed as a whole. Each embodied agent uses a model-free Reinforcement L…
Clinically-Driven Virtual Patient Cohorts Generation: An Application to Aorta
The combination of machine learning methods together with computational modeling and simulation of the cardiovascular system brings the possibility of obtaining very valuable information about new therapies or clinical devices through in-silico experiments. However, the application of machine learning methods demands access to large cohorts of patients. As an alternative to medical data acquisition and processing, which often requires some degree of manual intervention, the generation of virtual cohorts made of synthetic patients can be automated. However, the generation of a synthetic sample can still be computationally demanding to guarantee that it is clinically meaningful and that it re…
MARL-Ped+Hitmap: Towards Improving Agent-Based Simulations with Distributed Arrays
Multi-agent systems allow the modelling of complex, heterogeneous, and distributed systems in a realistic way. MARL-Ped is a multi-agent system tool, based on the MPI standard, for the simulation of different scenarios of pedestrians who autonomously learn the best behavior by Reinforcement Learning. MARL-Ped uses one MPI process for each agent by design, with a fixed fine-grain granularity. This requirement limits the performance of the simulations for a restricted number of processors that is lesser than the number of agents. On the other hand, Hitmap is a library to ease the programming of parallel applications based on distributed arrays. It includes abstractions for the automatic parti…
Calibrating a Motion Model Based on Reinforcement Learning for Pedestrian Simulation
In this paper, the calibration of a framework based in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL) for generating motion simulations of pedestrian groups is presented. The framework sets a group of autonomous embodied agents that learn to control individually its instant velocity vector in scenarios with collisions and friction forces. The result of the process is a different learned motion controller for each agent. The calibration of both, the physical properties involved in the motion of our embodied agents and the corresponding dynamics, is an important issue for a realistic simulation. The physics engine used has been calibrated with values taken from real pedestrian dynamics. Two experime…
Modeling, evaluation, and scale on artificial pedestrians: a literature review
Modeling pedestrian dynamics and their implementation in a computer are challenging and important issues in the knowledge areas of transportation and computer simulation. The aim of this article is to provide a bibliographic outlook so that the reader may have quick access to the most relevant works related to this problem. We have used three main axes to organize the article's contents: pedestrian models, validation techniques, and multiscale approaches. The backbone of this work is the classification of existing pedestrian models; we have organized the works in the literature under five categories, according to the techniques used for implementing the operational level in each pedestrian …
Emergent Collective Behaviors in a Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Pedestrian Simulation: A Case Study
In this work, a Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning framework is used to generate simulations of virtual pedestrians groups. The aim is to study the influence of two different learning approaches in the quality of generated simulations. The case of study consists on the simulation of the crossing of two groups of embodied virtual agents inside a narrow corridor. This scenario is a classic experiment inside the pedestrian modeling area, because a collective behavior, specifically the lanes formation, emerges with real pedestrians. The paper studies the influence of different learning algorithms, function approximation approaches, and knowledge transfer mechanisms on performance of learned ped…
Agent's actions as a classification criteria for the state space in a learning from rewards system
We focus in this paper on the problem of learning an autonomous agent's policy when the state space is very large and the set of actions available is comparatively short. To this end, we use a non-parametric decision rule (concretely, a nearest-neighbour strategy) in order to cluster the state space by means of the action that leads to a successful situation. Using an exploration strategy to avoid greedy behaviour, the agent builds clusters of positively-classified states through trial and error learning. In this paper, we implement a 3D synthetic agent which plays an 'avoid the asteroid' game that suits our assumptions. Using as the state space a feature vector space extracted from a visua…
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Simulating Pedestrian Navigation
In this paper we introduce a Multi-agent system that uses Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to learn local navigational behaviors to simulate virtual pedestrian groups. The aim of the paper is to study empirically the validity of RL to learn agent-based navigation controllers and their transfer capabilities when they are used in simulation environments with a higher number of agents than in the learned scenario. Two RL algorithms which use Vector Quantization (VQ) as the generalization method for the space state are presented. Both strategies are focused on obtaining a good vector quantizier that generalizes adequately the state space of the agents. We empirically state the convergence…
Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Real Trajectories to Get More Trustworthy Pedestrian Simulations
Reinforcement learning is one of the most promising machine learning techniques to get intelligent behaviors for embodied agents in simulations. The output of the classic Temporal Difference family of Reinforcement Learning algorithms adopts the form of a value function expressed as a numeric table or a function approximator. The learned behavior is then derived using a greedy policy with respect to this value function. Nevertheless, sometimes the learned policy does not meet expectations, and the task of authoring is difficult and unsafe because the modification of one value or parameter in the learned value function has unpredictable consequences in the space of the policies it represents…
Emergent behaviors and scalability for multi-agent reinforcement learning-based pedestrian models
This paper analyzes the emergent behaviors of pedestrian groups that learn through the multiagent reinforcement learning model developed in our group. Five scenarios studied in the pedestrian model literature, and with different levels of complexity, were simulated in order to analyze the robustness and the scalability of the model. Firstly, a reduced group of agents must learn by interaction with the environment in each scenario. In this phase, each agent learns its own kinematic controller, that will drive it at a simulation time. Secondly, the number of simulated agents is increased, in each scenario where agents have previously learnt, to test the appearance of emergent macroscopic beha…