Modeling and Analysis of Heterogeneous Traffic Networks with Anarchists and Socialist Traffic

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical framework for modeling heterogeneous traffic networks with socialists and anarchists, analyzing their impact on traffic flow and efficiency through novel metrics and real-world application.

Contribution

It introduces a new heterogeneous game model (HetGame) and metrics to evaluate the effects of different user behaviors on traffic networks.

Findings

Derived optimal and equilibrium traffic flows for heterogeneous networks.

Introduced metrics: price of α anarchy and price of good behavior.

Applied the algorithm to a real traffic network for practical insights.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous traffic network with multiple users classes which differ considerably in their path selection objective. In particular, we consider two classes of users: ones who seek to minimize social cost (socialists) and the ones with typical greedy objective (anarchists) which leads to a heterogeneous game termed as HetGame. The paper proposes an analytical framework to derive optimal/equilibrium flow in such a heterogeneous game along with a method for the same. The paper considers multiple examples of different networks to derive the optimal traffic assignment. We introduce two metrics: price of $\alpha$ anarchy and price of good behavior to evaluate the impact of anarchists and implications of central directives. Finally, the proposed algorithm is implemented for a real traffic network to derive insights.