Splitting rates equilibrium in Dynamic Traffic Assignment using the General Link Transmission Model to simulate network performances

This article presents a new model of Dynamic User Equilibrium that is particularly suited for ITS applications, where vehicle flows and travel times must be simulated on large road networks. The key feature of the proposed model is the different representation of time and space, less detailed on the demand side of the equilibrium problem, namely the route choice, and more detailed on the supply side, namely the dynamic network loading, that is here implemented through the General Link Transmission Model. This separation allows for a balanced investment of computing resources on the two sides of the equilibrium problem, by assuming that the pivot between them, also used as fixed-point variables, are the splitting rates, i.e. the turn probabilities at each node of the network evaluated without taking into account the destinations of vehicles. The proposed modelling framework is conceived for a seamless extension to real-time contexts.