Incremental equilibrium assignment and applications to traffic network model

Abstract

AbstractTo find a traffic assignment algorithm that is less complex than the current algorithms in terms of both methodology and implementation, the route‐based incremental equilibrium assignment (IEA) method is proposed. The IEA method iteratively performs incremental assignment and new origin‐destination (O‐D) demand extraction, where the new O‐D demand is obtained by aggregating the traffic flows from the routes whose travel times are greater than the shortest travel time. By extending the IEA method, the incremental stochastic user equilibrium and reliability‐based user equilibrium assignments are proposed to solve the stochastic user equilibrium (SUE) and reliability‐based user equilibrium (RUE) models, respectively. The traffic flow assignment and new O‐D demand extraction are carried out in terms of the route choice probability and the ratio of route flow to O‐D demand in the incremental stochastic user equilibrium assignment method; the redundant traffic flows from the non‐equilibrium routes are extracted. Unlike the IEA method, incremental reliability‐based user equilibrium assignment needs to derive both the mean and variance of the route travel time. The results from numerical experiments demonstrate the essential ideas and convergence performance of the proposed IEA algorithm and illustrate that IEA can be effectively extended to solve the SUE and RUE models.