Urban travel carbon emission mitigation approach using deep reinforcement learning

The urbanization process has led to a significant increase in energy consumption and carbon emissions, which can be mitigated through scientific urban planning and management. This research proposes a bottom-up urban carbon emission mitigation strategy based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Using Ningbo City as a case study, multi-source urban data, including points of interest (POI) data and urban transportation system data, are utilized, along with varying carbon emission coefficients for different travel modes, to construct a comprehensive carbon emission environment for urban areas. The proposed DRL model adopts an Actor-Critic framework, which iteratively optimizes the land use configuration and building type proportions within the urban matrix to achieve the goal of mitigating travel carbon emissions. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach exhibits significant carbon reduction effects in urban scenario. By adjusting the discount rate of the reward function, various optimization strategies can be obtained, such as short-term and long-term strategies, achieving reductions of 0.47% and 0.61%, respectively, which are notably higher than the 0.39% reduction expected if travel emissions were uniformly distributed across the matrix. The findings highlight the potential of DRL-based approaches in urban planning to achieve adaptive and data-driven strategies for carbon emission mitigation.