Dynamic Path-Based Equilibrium Assignment With Microscopic Traffic Simulation

This report summarizes research work conducted under TO4158 at the California ATMS Testbed of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Under this task order, the California ATMS testbed hosted two full-time PATH research postdocs (Henry Liu and Lianyu Chu) whose general responsibilities are focused on applications of ATMS in the Testbed environment. They are generally responsible for ensuring that the functional capabilities of the Testbed are designed, developed and maintained in a manner that complements and enhances the ATMS research objectives of the PATH program. Under the direction of PATH faculty researchers at UCI and the Testbed management team, they are generally responsible for software enhancements to the Laboratory "bench-top" system for modeling and evaluating ATMS, particularly with the microscopic simulation model Paramics. They also provided Caltrans the on-call support and technical guidance on various Caltrans micro-simulation projects related to the Paramics plugin modules developed at UCI. In addition to the general responsibilities outlined above, the PATH Researchers have specific research projects. The specific research project conducted under this task order is to develop a path-based equilibrium assignment model with micro-simulator Paramics. Since off-the-shlef Paramics can only do the link-based assignment, no path information during the traffic assignment process is stored nor provided. This will bring difficulties in the ATMS evaluation particularly related to the route diversion because partial or full path information is needed to conduct this type of evaluation with Paramics. To overcome this difficulty, a path-based assignment model is developed using Paramics Application Programming Interfaces (API) functions. The model comprises the advantages of the analytical traffic assignment model and the good properties of the simulation tools, which can represented the real world more properly. Some key techniques, route choice plug-in, turn penalty consideration and methods of successive average, and etc., were applied in the model. The Paramics V4 was selected as the demonstration simulation tool. A real grid network in Tucson, Arizona, was designed to test the performance of the model, and the results showed that the model converged to the user equilibrium as expected.