Broad Reinforcement Learning for Supporting Fast Autonomous IoT

The emergence of a massive Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystem is changing the human lifestyle. In several practical scenarios, IoT still faces significant challenges with reliance on human assistance and unacceptable response time for the treatment of big data. Therefore, it is very urgent to establish a new framework and algorithm to solve problems specific to this kind of fast autonomous IoT. Traditional reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches have abilities of autonomous decision making, but time-consuming modeling and training procedures limit their applications. To get over this dilemma, this article proposes the broad reinforcement learning (BRL) approach that fits fast autonomous IoT as it combines the broad learning system (BLS) with a reinforcement learning paradigm to improve the agent’s efficiency and accuracy of modeling and decision making. Specifically, a BRL framework is first constructed. Then, the associated learning algorithm, containing training pool introduction, training sample preparation, and incremental learning for BLS, is carefully designed. Finally, as a case study of fast autonomous IoT, the proposed BRL approach is applied to traffic light control, aiming to alleviate traffic congestion in the intersections of smart cities. The experimental results show that the proposed BRL approach can learn better action policy at a shorter execution time when compared with competing approaches.