An equilibrium algorithm for the spatial aggregation problem of traffic assignment

Abstract

Present traffic assignment methods require that all possible origins and destinations of trips taking place within a study area be represented as if they were taking place to and from a small set of points or centroids. Each centroid is supposed to represent the location of all trip-ends within a given zone, and this necessarily misrepresents points located at the edges of the zone. In order to alleviate this problem (which we refer to as the spatial aggregation problem) one could use smaller zones and more centroids, but existing traffic assignment algorithms cannot efficiently handle many centroids. This paper introduces an algorithm procedure which is designed to handle a substantially larger number of centroids. In the paper that follows, the technique is further developed to take into account a continuous distribution of population.