Unified Route Choice Framework and Empirical Study in Urban Traffic Control Environment

TRB 2014 Annual Meeting Paper revised from original submittal. Route choice systems (RCS) and traffic control systems (TCS) constitute two major approaches to mitigating congestion in urban road networks. The interaction between signal control and route choice is often captured in the combined traffic assignment and control problem, whose solution has many practical applications. In this paper, we consider this interaction from a narrower RCS perspective, and focus on distributed route choice models for operational rather than planning purposes. Our goal is to analyze the relative performance of alternative route choice models as different assumptions are made about the type of TCS in use in the urban road network. To this end, we define a unified agent-based framework for formulating different route choice models, and integrate this framework with a microscopic traffic simulation environment. Within our framework, each agent’s memory is updated repeatedly (daily) to reflect available prior individual and social experience, and then a route is chosen by a probabilistic sequential decision-making process that is a function of the agent’s updated current memory. Several previously developed route choice models from the literature are implemented using the framework, and their performance, alon