Abstract
With the fast-growing telematics market and maturing traffic-information services, telematics devices provide a feasible means with which to manage traffic more efficiently. The provision of traffic information to travelers usually involves different parties that have distinctive objectives: travelers are concerned with benefits of travel-time savings at an affordable service charge, private information service providers (ISPs) seek to provide marketable information services from which they can derive a profit, and traffic management centers (TMCs) have the responsibility to maintain and improve system performance, especially to minimize the total system travel time. How transportation system managers can analyze the trade-offs among these objectives and adjust this new traffic-information flow diagram to improve system performance remains an open question. The trade-offs needed among the conflicting multiple objectives of different parties are studied, and traffic system performance is analyzed. The complex traffic network is formulated as a bilevel program. The upper level can be formulated by using various objective functions, such as the objectives for ISP and TMC. The lower level is a multiclass dynamic traffic-assignment model, which determines dynamic traffic flows in the network by considering the information dissemination strategies provided by the upper-level model. Numerical results of a small network are provided to illustrate the behavior of this model, and they prove that when there is congestion in the dynamic transportation network, appropriate subscribed rates benefit both all travelers and system performance, while the ISPs’ information influences little without congestion in the transportation network.
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