  Traffic signal control is an emerging application scenario for reinforcement
learning. Besides being as an important problem that affects people's daily
life in commuting, traffic signal control poses its unique challenges for
reinforcement learning in terms of adapting to dynamic traffic environment and
coordinating thousands of agents including vehicles and pedestrians. A key
factor in the success of modern reinforcement learning relies on a good
simulator to generate a large number of data samples for learning. The most
commonly used open-source traffic simulator SUMO is, however, not scalable to
large road network and large traffic flow, which hinders the study of
reinforcement learning on traffic scenarios. This motivates us to create a new
traffic simulator CityFlow with fundamentally optimized data structures and
efficient algorithms. CityFlow can support flexible definitions for road
network and traffic flow based on synthetic and real-world data. It also
provides user-friendly interface for reinforcement learning. Most importantly,
CityFlow is more than twenty times faster than SUMO and is capable of
supporting city-wide traffic simulation with an interactive render for
monitoring. Besides traffic signal control, CityFlow could serve as the base
for other transportation studies and can create new possibilities to test
machine learning methods in the intelligent transportation domain.
