Multi-hop Control Scheme for Urban Traffic Congestion Mitigation with Non-Compliant Users

Abstract

Traffic congestion has negative impacts on both the individual and social aspects of urban life. The multi-hop control scheme (MHCS), which recommends users pass through some intermediate checkpoints (ICs), has shown great potential in alleviating network congestion and enhancing network efficiency. While MHCS enables users to travel through the shortest routes between ICs and thus induces lower unfairness compared to other route control schemes, it cannot prevent non-compliant behaviors of selfish travelers. This study aims to shed light on the impacts of such behavior on the performance of MHCS. We relax the assumption of full compliance by adding a set of constraints to the original MHCS problem that define the non-compliance ratio. The numerical results suggest that, despite the overall negative effect of non-compliance, the ultimate system performance is largely related to the design of ICs. It was also found that enforcing full compliance over all travelers may not be worth the total travel time savings in consideration of the trade-off between fairness and efficiency.