Experimental analysis of dynamic route choice behavior

Abstract

This study analyzes the dynamics of route choice behavior by laboratory-like experiments that repeatedly ask the participants to respond to hypothetical route choices. The analysis considers the case where a pool of travelers depart from a given origin to a single destination connected by two parallel alternative routes. Traffic conditions varying from day to day are represented by travel time. Travel time prediction errors (the difference between predicted and actual travel time) as well as actual travel times are treated as “experiences” accumulating through the experiments. It is found that the traffic flow seems to be hard to converge to an equilibrium, so that existing traffic assignment models may not be adequate to analyze actual traffic phenomena. Some important insights regarding the mechanism of driver's route choice behavior are also obtained by the experiments. For example, the results show that there exist two patterns of using previous travel experiences for prediction of travel time.