A discrete day-to-day link flow dynamic model considering travelers’ heterogeneous inertia patterns

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the impact of heterogeneous psychological inertia of travelers on link flow evolution process on a day-to-day basis. The psychological inertia of a traveler is defined as his/her reluctance to reconsider his/her route choice, and is characterized by a sequence of binary parameters along time. Travelers are grouped into different classes by their inertia patterns. Based on these classes, a variational inequality formulation for the multi-class user equilibrium problem is presented. We develop a generic day-to-day link flow dynamic model by considering heterogeneous inertia patterns of the travelers. The convergence properties of the model are rigorously demonstrated. The developed model is formulated in a general form under mild assumptions. We further consider a special case of the generic model. We examine properties of this special case model, and investigate its relationship with existing models in the literature. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate our theoretical results.

KEYWORDS:

• Inertia pattern
• class-based formulation
• heterogeneous psychological inertia
• day-to-day
• link flow adjustment model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China [grant number 2018YFB1600900]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 71901189, 71601046]; Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [grant number BK20160686] and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University [grant number 1-ZVPT].