Dynamic Traffic Modeling: Approximating the equilibrium for peak periods in urban areas

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of the choice of departure time in cities subject to heavy congestion. The model originally developed by Vickrey and extended by many authors was developed for bottlenecks with constant capacity. While this assumption might be reasonable for physical bottlenecks submitted to light congestion, empirical evidence shows that in urban networks, the trip completion rate strongly depends on the density. Several analytical approaches have been proposed to address this shortcoming, but they all rely on some simplifications. In this work, the impact of some of these simplifications on the tra c flow dynamics is first evaluated using simulation. Then, a heuristic is proposed to approximate the equilibrium with more realistic assumptions and the results are compared with those that can be obtained with the widely used Method of Successive Averages (MSA). While analytical solutions assuming a constant capacity remain useful to design system optimum solutions, the heuristic proposed is complementary and allows addressing the user equilibrium problem. This talk concludes by presenting how this tool can be used to create strategies to alleviate peak-hour congestion in urban areas.

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