Digital Twin-based Cooperative Autonomous Driving in Smart Intersections: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

Abstract: Unsignalized intersections pose safety and efficiency challenges due to complex traffic flows and blind spots. In this paper, a digital twin (DT)-based cooperative driving system with roadside unit (RSU)-centric architecture is proposed for enhancing safety and efficiency at unsignalized intersections. The system leverages comprehensive bird-eye-view (BEV) perception to eliminate blind spots and employs a hybrid reinforcement learning (RL) framework combining offline pre-training with online fine-tuning. Specifically, driving policies are initially trained using conservative Q-learning (CQL) with behavior cloning (BC) on real datasets, then fine-tuned using multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) with self-attention mechanisms to handle dynamic multi-agent coordination. The RSU implements real-time commands via vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields failure rates below 0.03\% coordinating up to three connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), significantly outperforming traditional methods. In addition, the system exhibits sub-linear computational scaling with inference times under 40 ms. Furthermore, it demonstrates robust generalization across diverse unsignalized intersection scenarios, indicating its practicality and readiness for real-world deployment.