Parallelization of the B static traffic assignment algorithm

Abstract

A widely used technique for predicting traffic flows in individual roads of a road traffic network is the user-equilibrium (UE) traffic assignment (TA). This technique assigns trips from origins to destinations in a road traffic network so that all trips use the cheapest path. The cost of the path, which consists of roads (edges), is the sum of the roads costs. These costs increase with increasing flow in these roads. In this paper, we describe the parallelization of the B algorithm – a relatively new TA algorithm with a fast convergence to a solution. Since the nature of the algorithm and the nature of its fast convergence complicate the parallelization itself, we considered and implemented three parallel variants and tested them on real road traffic networks to investigate their convergence, usability, and speed. The parallelization is intended for a shared memory parallel computing environment. The description of the parallelization along with the performed tests is the main contribution of this paper.