Subjective-utility travel time budget modeling in the stochastic traffic network assignment

ABSTRACT

In this article, we propose a new model called subjective-utility travel time budget (SU-TTB) model to capture travelers' risk-averse route choices. In the travel time budget (TTB) and mean-excess travel time (METT) model, a predefined confidence level is needed to capture the risk-aversion in route choice. Due to the day-to-day route travel time variations, the exact confidence level is hard to be predicted. With the SU-TTB model, we assume travelers' confidence level belongs to an interval that they may comply with in the route choice. The two main components of SU-TTB are the utility function and the TTB model. We can show that the SU-TTB can be reduced to the TTB and METT model with proper utility function for the confidence levels. We can also prove its equivalence with our recently proposed nonlinear-expectation route travel time (NERTT) model in some cases and give some new interpretation on the NERTT with this equivalence. Finally, we formulate the SU-TTB model as a variational inequality (VI) problem to model the risk-averse user equilibrium (RAUE), termed as generalized RAUE (GRAUE). The GRAUE is solved via a heuristic gradient projection algorithm, and the model and solution algorithm are demonstrated with the Braess's traffic network and the Nguyen and Dupuis's traffic network.