THE IMPACT OF TRAFFIC INFORMATION ON DRIVERS ' ROUTE CHOICE-USING COMPETENCE SETS ANALYSIS

Abstract: Generally speaking, drivers ’ route choice is a fuzzy problem. However, if drivers’ habitual domain becomes stable and without significant stimuli, route choice becomes a routine problem. Route choice can become fuzzy again if drivers perceive information stimuli. Intuitively, traffic information should help drivers to reach destination in an efficient way, but the abundant and complex information could overwhelm the drivers. In this work, a different and novel approach to complement the driver route choice decision models is exploited. The concept of habitual domains and competence sets proposed by Yu in 1980 is applied to the route choice problem. The effect of traffic information on route choice is isolated to analysis the behavior of route choice decision. Performance indexes of route choice decision are developed to help the drivers or the traffic information providers in expanding their competence sets to fully address the needs of route choice decision