General solution scheme for the Static Link Transmission Model

Abstract

Until the present day most static traffic assignment models are neither capacity constrained nor storage constrained. Recent studies have resulted in novel approaches that consider capacity constraints and sometimes storage constraints. We build upon the results of these works and the model formulated in our companion paper Bliemer and Raadsen (2018a) which comprises a static assignment model formulation that is both capacity constrained as well as storage constrained. The formulation of this model is derived from a continuous time dynamic network loading model proposed in Bliemer and Raadsen (2018b). The prospect of being able to capture spillback effects in static assignment provides new opportunities for making this modelling method more capable. It is well known that the absence of spillback typically results in significant underestimation of path travel times. This is especially true for paths that do not traverse bottleneck(s) directly, but that are affected by the space occupied of queues that are spilling back. Similar to Smith (2013) and Smith et al. (2013), Bliemer and Raadsen (2018a) did not provide a solution algorithm. In this paper, we take their model formulation and propose a general solution scheme suitable for large scale networks.