Formula-E multi-car race strategy development—a novel approach using reinforcement learning

Electric motorsport such as Formula E is becoming more and more popular in recent years. Race strategy in such races can be very complex involving resource management, e.g. energy and thermal management, but more importantly multi-car interactions which could be both collaborative and competitive. Reinforcement Learning has been implemented in the literature for such electric racing strategy development but only accounts for one single car. In this paper, we proposed a new architecture iRaXL to implement reinforcement learning for such complex strategy development featuring hybrid action space, multi-car interactions, and non-zero-sum gaming. The iRaXL proves to be able to develop different strategies for individual competitors and also team-based objectives. In a bigger scope, this framework can be used to solve more generic problems with hybrid features such as zero/non-zero-sum games, discretized/continuous action space, and competition/collaboration interactions.