User Equilibrium Analysis Considering Travelers’ Context-Dependent Route Choice Behavior on the Risky Traffic Network

Abstract

This paper studies travelers’ context-dependent route choice behavior in a risky trafficnetwork from a long-term perspective, focusing on the effect of travelers’ salience characteristics. In particular, a flow-dependent salience theory is proposed for this analysis, where the flow denotes the traffic flow on the risky route. In the proposed model, travelers’ attention is drawn to the salient travel utility, and the objective probabilities of the state of the world are replaced by the decision weights distorted in favor of this salient travel utility. A long-run user equilibrium will be achieved when no traveler can improve his or her salient travel utility by unilaterally changing routes, termed salient user equilibrium, which extends the scope of the Wardropian user equilibrium. Furthermore, we prove the existence and uniqueness of this salient user equilibrium. Finally, numerical studies demonstrate our theoretical findings. The equilibrium results show non-intuitive insights into travelers’ route choice behavior. (1) Travelers can be risk-seeking (the travel utility of a risky route is small with a relatively high probability), risk-neutral (in special situations), or risk-averse (the travel utility of a risky route is large with a relatively high probability), which depends on the salient state. (2) The extent of travelers’ risk-seeking or risk-averse behavior depends on their extent of salience bias, while the risk-neutral behavior is irrelative to this salience bias.