Day-to-Day Traffic Network Modeling under Route-Guidance Misinformation: Endogenous Trust and Resilience in CAV Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coupled traffic and trust model for route-guidance misinformation, revealing how endogenous trust dynamics influence network resilience and recovery in CAV environments.

Contribution

It develops a novel framework integrating trust evolution into day-to-day traffic modeling, with theoretical analysis and numerical validation on real-world networks.

Findings

Trust creates a threshold-based resilience mechanism.

Above the threshold, trust erosion significantly reduces attack impact.

Traffic can recover before trust, indicating a hidden vulnerability window.

Abstract

Connected and autonomous vehicles and smart mobility services increasingly use digital route guidance as an operational input to traffic network management. When this information becomes unreliable or adversarial, day-to-day traffic models must represent not only flow adaptation but also the evolution of user trust in the information source. This paper develops a coupled day-to-day traffic assignment and trust-evolution framework for route-guidance misinformation. Within-day congestion is represented by Lighthill-Whitham-Richards network loading, while day-to-day route choice follows bounded-rationality logit learning with trust-dependent reliance on external guidance. Trust is modeled as an aggregate class-level behavioral reliance state encoded by a Beta evidence model and updated from repeated guidance errors. Theoretical analysis establishes stationary equilibria, a conservative stability guide, a weighted compliance index for population-level vulnerability, and an asymmetric recovery law that explains post-attack trust hysteresis. Numerical experiments on Sioux Falls, with an Anaheim robustness check, show that endogenous trust creates a threshold-based resilience mechanism. Below the trust-activation threshold, the attack remains behaviorally stealthy and dynamic trust provides almost no attenuation. Above the threshold, trust erosion reduces the impact of the fixed-trust attack by about 91 percent in Sioux Falls and 85 percent in Anaheim. The experiments also show that CAV penetration increases fixed-trust vulnerability while preserving dynamic attenuation, and that traffic performance can recover before trust, resulting in a 77-day hidden vulnerability window. The results provide a trust-aware modeling basis for resilience analysis in CAV-enabled traffic networks.