Stochastic Prediction Equilibrium for Dynamic Traffic Assignment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new stochastic prediction equilibrium framework for dynamic traffic assignment that models both physical flow dynamics and the decision-making of individual traffic participants, accounting for noisy predictions.

Contribution

It develops a novel framework combining physical flow and stochastic routing decisions, providing new existence and uniqueness results for equilibrium conditions.

Findings

Established existence of stochastic prediction equilibrium.

Proved uniqueness under natural assumptions.

Unified known and new equilibrium results.

Abstract

Stochastic effects significantly influence the dynamics of traffic flows. Many dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) models attempt to capture these effects by prescribing a specific ratio that determines how flow splits across different routes based on the routes' costs. In this paper, we propose a new framework for DTA that incorporates the interplay between the routing decisions of each single traffic participant, the stochastic nature of predicting the future state of the network, and the physical flow dynamics. Our framework consists of an edge loading operator modeling the physical flow propagation and a routing operator modeling the routing behavior of traffic participants. The routing operator is assumed to be set-valued and capable to model complex (deterministic) equilibrium conditions as well as stochastic equilibrium conditions assuming that measurements for predicting traffic are noisy. As our main results, we derive several quite general equilibrium existence and uniqueness results which not only subsume known results from the literature but also lead to new results. Specifically, for the new stochastic prediction equilibrium, we show existence and uniqueness under natural assumptions on the probability distribution over the predictions.