An efficient method to compute traffic assignment problems with elastic demands

Abstract

The traffic assignment problem (TAP) with elastic demands can be formulated as an optimization problem, the objective of which is the sum of a congestion function and a disutility function. We propose to use a variant of the analytic center cutting plane method to solve this problem. We test the method on TAP instances with the Bureau of Public Roads congestion function and different demand functions (constant elasticity and linear). The results of the numerical experiments show that it is possible to solve large instances with high accuracy.