Approximating Dynamic Equilibrium Analysis in Multi-Region Network Based on Macroscopic Fundamental Diagram

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Modeling and control of road traffic in large-scale urban networks present considerable challenges. The traffic equilibrium phenomena, with the question of route choice behavior in case of heterogeneous urban networks, has not been thoroughly investigated in parsimonious and classical models due to the limitation, like large network size, spatiotemporal propagation of congestion, and the interaction between driver decisions, etc. In this paper, we propose a bi-level approximating dynamic equilibrium model (BLADEM) for the approximating dynamic equilibrium analysis in multi-region network based on macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD). The proposed model combines the region-based model and the internal-region model. With the information from region MFD, the region-based model is used to implement the time-dependent regional route choice estimation. Traffic equilibrium condition (dynamic user equilibrium, DUE) is considered in an internal-region model with time-aggregated regional OD demand from the region level. Furthermore, the complexity of the proposed model is derived. Then, the comparative analysis of the algorithm complexity between the proposed model and the DUE model is given. The proposed model is evaluated based on the high-resolution vehicle trajectory data (or connected vehicles trajectory data) from the DiDi platform collected in Chengdu, China with more than 3,000,000 GPS points during a typical workday. The evaluation results show that the proposed model can obtain the approximating traffic dynamics compared with the DUE algorithm. Pleasantly, the improved calculation efficiency is between 21% and 42%. The results indicate the promising potential of using the proposed model to analyze approximating dynamic equilibrium in the multi-region heterogeneous network.