A variety of macroscopic traffic flow models have been applied to formulate the link-based system optimal dynamic traffic assignment (SO-DTA) problem in a many-to-one network. It is expected that SO-DTA models based on various traffic flow models usually result in different optimal link traffic evolution patterns, but whether and how traffic flow models affect the minimal system cost and the corresponding optimal arrival pattern at the destination is unclear. Three traffic flow models–point-queue, spatial-queue, and cell-transmission–are examined, and their resulted minimal system cost in many-to-one networks is compared. It is proved that for three simple networks–a linear network with two sequential bottlenecks, a two-in-one-out merge network, and a one-in-two-out diverge network–the minimal system costs for the SO-DTA models based on these three traffic flow models are identical. Numerical experiments show that this property appears to be held for general many-to-one networks. The reason may be that all three traffic flow models propagate the uncongested flows at the same speed and release the congested flows always at the link capacity. In SO-DTA applications where only the minimal system cost or arrival pattern at the destination is of major interest, the findings can be utilized to substantially expedite the solution procedure.
What Do Different Traffic Flow Models Mean for System-Optimal Dynamic Traffic Assignment in a Many-to-One Network?
Transportation Research Record
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board ; 2088 , 1 ; 157-166
2008-01-01
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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