Title: Numerical Experiments to Identify Impacts of Risk and Uncertainty in Traffic Network Equilibrium Model
Abstract: The focus of this paper is an examination of the multiple, potentially conflicting influences of three important elements of traffic assignment modeling: uncertainty, risk and congestion. Uncertainty is the extent to which travelers' route choice remains unexplained in the traffic assignment model; risk refers to travelers' attitudes to travel time, and traffic congestion is of course the mechanism by which route choices feedback into network route costs. In order to facilitate this investigation, we choose to study the simplest model that possesses the key qualitative features we wish to examine, namely the Stochastic User Equilibrium (SUE) model where route travel cost is given by a non-linear transformation of route travel time. Numerical experiments are carried out on two different sized networks, considering the flow-independent and flow-dependent traffic assignment problems. These experiments conclude that the first two elements of our interest directly influence the travelers' sensitivity in their route choice decision. A relationship between these elements is developed in the form of a rescaling factor. Furthermore, it is found that the combined influence of all elements reveals the congestion effect in travelers' route choice dominates the influence of their perceived network costs when the path distillate changes are relatively large for a lower change in the travelers? risk-related behavior.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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