Influencing long-term route choice by traffic control measures, a basic model study

Reference:
M. van den Berg, A. Hegyi, B. De Schutter, and H. Hellendoorn, "Influencing long-term route choice by traffic control measures, a basic model study," Proceedings of the 9th TRAIL Congress 2006 - TRAIL in Motion - CD-ROM, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 16 pp., Nov. 2006.

Abstract:
Currently used traffic control measures, such as traffic signals, ramp metering installations etc., are often not designed to influence the route choice of drivers. However, traffic control measures influence the travel times that are experienced in the network. Since route choice, at least for a part, is based on experienced travel times, the measures also influence the long-term route choice. This influence can be seen as a side-effect of the measures, but in this paper we will investigate the possibilities to explicitly use the influence of the traffic control measures to change the route choice. With basic traffic flow and route choice models we investigate possible equilibrium turning rates for a network with two routes. We use two different types of control: speed control and outflow control. The control method used is a simple controller which makes the analytical investigation of the effects of the controller possible, but the results can be extended to more sophisticated control methods.