Travelers' Rationality in Online Anticipatory Emergency Response Model

Abstract

Traditional allocation decisions of freeway emergency resources only focused on serving the current emergency and ignored future emergencies which may occur. These studies have myopic decisions with an assumption of independence between emergencies and neglect travelers’ experiences of unexpected events during their commuting. This research will contribute to relaxing the structural assumptions of independence between events, optimizing online look‐ahead decisions and designing behaviors of individual travel agents during the assignment of emergency vehicles. An agent-based online optimization model is proposed to represent bounded rational decisions under strictly imposed capacity constraints, due to clearing activities at an emergency site. Under tight transportation capacity due to a lane‐blockage for clearing an emergency, user equilibrium will be considered on the network.

This research will find the rationality of each traveler to minimize disutility within rational bands, choosing user optimal path from a limited number of capacity feasible routing options. TransModeler, the simulation software, will be used to test the optimization model with simulation with a direct and indirect impact of dispatching policy on the transportation network and to test the effect of dispatching model on travelers’ rational behavior. The output of the simulation will provide information about wide-area multimodal networks in great detail and with high fidelity.

CATM Research Affiliate:
Hyoshin (“John”) Park (NC A&T)