Center for Traffic Simulation Studies

With the fast-growing telematics market and maturing traffic information services, the pervasive use of telematics devices provides a feasible means of more efficiently managing traffic. Providing traffic information to travelers usually involves different parties that have distinctive objectives: travelers are concerned with the benefits of travel time savings, private information service providers (ISPs) aim to provide marketable information services from which they can derive a profit, and traffic management centers (TMCs) are responsible for maintaining and improving performance, i.e. minimizing total system travel time. The question is how transportation system managers can leverage this new traffic information flow diagram to improve system performance while considering the tradeoffs among these objectives. The goal of this paper is to study the tradeoffs among the conflicting objectives of different parties and the resulting traffic system performance. We formulate a bi-level model of a complex traffic network. The upper level can be formulated using various objective functions such as the objectives for ISP and TMC. The lower level is a multi-class dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) model that determines dynamic traffic flows in the network by considering the information dissemination strategies provided by the upper level model. Numerical results of a small network are provided to illustrate the behavior of this model.