  In the coming years and decades, autonomous vehicles (AVs) will become
increasingly prevalent, offering new opportunities for safer and more
convenient travel and potentially smarter traffic control methods exploiting
automation and connectivity. Car following is a prime function in autonomous
driving. Car following based on reinforcement learning has received attention
in recent years with the goal of learning and achieving performance levels
comparable to humans. However, most existing RL methods model car following as
a unilateral problem, sensing only the vehicle ahead. Recent literature,
however, Wang and Horn [16] has shown that bilateral car following that
considers the vehicle ahead and the vehicle behind exhibits better system
stability. In this paper we hypothesize that this bilateral car following can
be learned using RL, while learning other goals such as efficiency
maximisation, jerk minimization, and safety rewards leading to a learned model
that outperforms human driving.
  We propose and introduce a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) framework for
car following control by integrating bilateral information into both state and
reward function based on the bilateral control model (BCM) for car following
control. Furthermore, we use a decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning
framework to generate the corresponding control action for each agent. Our
simulation results demonstrate that our learned policy is better than the human
driving policy in terms of (a) inter-vehicle headways, (b) average speed, (c)
jerk, (d) Time to Collision (TTC) and (e) string stability.
