Multi-commodity traffic assignment by continuum approximation of network flow with variable demand

Consider a city with several highly compact central business districts (CBD), and the commuters’ destinations from each of them are dispersed over the whole city. Since at a particular location inside the city the traffic movements from different CBDs share the same space and do not cancel out each other as in conventional fluid flow problems albeit travelling in different directions, the traffic flows from a CBD to the destinations over the city are considered as one commodity. The interaction of the traffic flows among different commodities is governed by a cost–flow relationship. The case of variable demand is considered. The primal formulation of the continuum equilibrium model is given and proved to satisfy the user optimal conditions, and the dual formulation of the problem and its complementary conditions are also discussed. A finite element method is then employed to solve the continuum problem. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.