Experimental Study of Day-to-Day Route-Choice Behavior: Evaluating the Effect of ATIS Market Penetration

Shixu Liu,Hao Yan,Said M Easa,Lidan Guo,Yingnuo Tang,Heng Wei

doi:10.1155/2020/8393724

Abstract

This paper examines the travelers’ day-to-day route-choice behavior with Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) through laboratory-like experimental method. Five groups of route-choice behavior experiments are designed to simulate actual daily behavior of travelers. In the experiment, subjects are provided with different levels of the complete road network information to simulate the proportion of subjects equipped with ATIS equipment (i.e., ATIS market penetration) and choose the routes repeatedly. The subject’s route-choice behavior under different proportions of complete road network information is analyzed, and the strategy of releasing such complete information is determined when the performance of road network system is the best. The Braess network which consists of three routes was used in the experiment and analysis. The results show that the fluctuation of traffic flow runs through the entire experiments, but it tends to converge to user equilibrium. When the market penetration is 75%, both the fluctuation of traffic flow and the tendency of subjects to change routes are the smallest, so the road network system is the most stable. This interesting result indicates that releasing traffic information to all travelers is not the best. Other results show that the travel times of the three routes in the five groups of experiments tend to converge to and finally fluctuate around user-equilibrium travel time. With the increase in ATIS market penetration, the average travel time of subjects in each round tends to increase. The overall trend of the five groups of experiments is that as the number of route switches increases, the average travel time increases. The results also indicate that releasing traffic information to all travelers cannot weaken the Braess Paradox. On the contrary, the more travelers are provided with traffic information, the less likely it will weaken the Braess Paradox.

Highlights

In recent years, traffic congestion problems have become increasingly serious, especially in large metropolitan areas
It should be noted that the experimental settings of this study are different from those of previous studies and so is the study objective. erefore, this paper focuses on the following questions: (1) Does Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) market penetration influence travelers’ day-to-day route-choice behavior using laboratorylike behavior experiments?
Based on Mann–Whitney U Test [50], the hypothesis test results between two groups of five experiments are shown in Table 9. e table demonstrates that when t is less than 50%, there is a significant difference in the overall average travel time, but when t exceeds 50%, the overall average travel time has no significant difference. is interesting result reveals that after the number of people who know the complete network information reaches a certain proportion, the continuous increase in information provision is not conducive to the improvement of the performance of the road network system. erefore, providing complete network information to all travelers cannot achieve system optimization

Summary

Introduction

Traffic congestion problems have become increasingly serious, especially in large metropolitan areas. With the rapid development of intelligent systems and big traffic data, Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS), as an important part of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), is being considered by many researchers to alleviate traffic congestion problems [2, 3]. Such developments make the study of travel behavior under the influence of information become one of the hot issues in the field of transportation engineering [4, 5]. Ben-Elia and Avineri [14] systematically summarized the impact of traffic information on travel behavior

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion