Investigating Braess' Paradox with Time-Dependent Queues

Wei-Hua Lin · Hong Kam Lo

23 citations0/0 files storedTransportation Science

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Transportation Planning and Optimization Traffic control and management Traffic Prediction and Management Techniques

Abstract

In the 1960s, Braess showed that the overall system performance of a transportation network can be degraded when a new link is added to the network, given that travelers choose their routes based on the user equilibrium (UE) principle. This phenomenon is often referred to as Braess' paradox (BP). The original five-link BP network has been studied extensively with static link performance functions. In this paper, we revisit the original BP network with a dynamic point-queue model and examine whether the results from the static model would hold for the case with time-dependent queues. For this purpose, we solve the BP problem with the consideration of dynamic queuing that leads the system to a steady state while satisfying the dynamic user equilibrium (DUE) condition at every instant. Our results indicate that the locations of congestion, or “hot spots,” of the system are sensitive to the capacity of each link in an intricate manner. The “surprising result” reported in previous studies with link performance functions, that a system can spontaneously grow out of Braess' paradox if the demand is sufficiently high, does not occur with time-dependent queues. Instead, we show that queues in different stages have different impacts on the system performance. The implication of this result is discussed in the context of developing proactive dynamic traffic control strategies that can eliminate the negative impact of BP while keeping the system operating at the DUE condition. Even though this study focuses on the original five-link network, the results illustrate the potential pitfalls of extending insights developed from a static framework for dynamic traffic and the importance of studying the problem with a dynamic framework for real-time traffic control.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

References

1982Applications of Queueing Theory 1983The Prevalence of Braess' Paradox 1973Unternehmensforschung 1997Braess' paradox: Some new insights 1984On some traffic equilibrium theory paradoxes 1981The Braess paradox 1998Algorithms for logit-based stochastic user equilibrium assignment 1998A capacity paradox in network design and how to avoid it

Cited by

2016Excessive noise paradoxes in urban transportation networks 2014Braess' paradox in a generalised traffic network 2021Braess’ paradox in the age of traffic information 2016Braess Paradox of traffic networks with mixed equilibrium behaviors 2020A Transportation Network Paradox: Consideration of Travel Time and Health Damage due to Pollution 2023Bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review of the traffic paradoxes (1968–2022)2011

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.