Robust Multi-Criteria Traffic Network Equilibrium Problems with Path Capacity Constraints

Abstract

With the progress of society and the diversification of transportation modes, people are faced with more and more complicated travel choices, and thus, multi-criteria route choosing optimization problems have drawn increased attention in recent years. A number of multi-criteria traffic network equilibrium problems have been proposed, but most of them do not involve data uncertainty nor computational methods. This paper focuses on the methods for solving robust multi-criteria traffic network equilibrium problems with path capacity constraints. The concepts of the robust vector equilibrium and the robust vector equilibrium with respect to the worst case are introduced, respectively. For the robust vector equilibrium, an equivalent min–max optimization problem is constructed. A direct search algorithm, in which the step size without derivatives and redundant parameters, is proposed for solving this min–max problem. In addition, we construct a smoothing optimization problem based on a variant version of ReLU activation function to compute the robust weak vector equilibrium flows with respect to the worst case and then find robust vector equilibrium flows with respect to the worst case by using the heaviside step function. Finally, extensive numerical examples are given to illustrate the excellence of our algorithms compared with existing algorithms. It is shown that the proposed min–max algorithm may take less time to find the robust vector equilibrium flows and the smoothing method can more effectively generate a subset of the robust vector equilibrium with respect to the worst case.

Keywords

• multi-criteria traffic network
• robust vector equilibrium
• min–max method
• smoothing method