The study of dynamic user-equilibrium traffic assignment

Dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) predicts the evolution of traffic conditions on a road network for given travel demands. It takes time dependencies explicitly into account, and is thus more realistic than static traffic assignment. Many modern traffic management concepts such as ATMS (Advanced Traffic Management System) rely on the application of DTA to acquire in advance the time-varying conditions of a road network for more efficient traffic management.; In the past, a variety of DTA studies have been conducted in recognition of different behavior assumptions and formulation approaches. While these studies contributed to a better understanding of the dynamic traffic assignment problem, there are still a number of critical issues left unexplored or unresolved. And these issues seem to affect the progress of dynamic user equilibrium (DUE) traffic assignment more than other types of dynamic assignment, such as system optimal dynamic traffic assignment.; This thesis is intended to study a number of critical issues in the formulation and solution of the DUE traffic assignment problem. These include a discussion of consistency conditions in modeling network dynamics; an in depth exploration of the delay-function-based link model; a comparison study of several analytical link models; development of an asynchronous network loading strategy; and a comparison study of a collection of DTA algorithms. These seemingly detached topics are essentially related to a very basic yet important concern in DUE study: how to correctly formulate and accurately and efficiently solve the assignment problem. Although the results of this study are obtained in a DUE setting, some of them are important to other types of dynamic assignment as well, for different types of DTA formulations may still share the same network dynamics model.