Long-term Microscopic Traffic Simulation with History-Masked Multi-agent Imitation Learning

Microscopic traffic simulators are powerful tools for transportation engineers and planners to analyze and predict the impact of microscopic adjustments on traffic patterns without disrupting real-world traffic. For example, it can help analyze how changing road shape like replacing an intersection with a roundabout affects traffic patterns [1], and develop traffic-aware autonomous driving policies that enhance overall traffic efficiency [2, 3]. However, creating a realistic simulator that can simultaneously replicate the microscopic response of human drivers to traffic conditions and the resulting long-term macroscopic statistics is a challenging task. In recent years, there have been significant efforts to develop realistic traffic simulators that accurately model human driving behavior. Traditional traffic simulators, such as SUMO [4], AIMSUN [5], and MITSIM [6], typically rely on heuristic car-following models like the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM) [7]. However, despite careful calibration of parameters, these simplified, rulebased models often fail to deliver accurate simulations [8] due to the complexity of real-world traffic environments.