The effectiveness of route guidance for expressway reconstruction and expansion projects

Expressway reconstruction and expansion projects are becoming increasingly important in China’s infrastructure construction. Traffic management is pivotal for maintaining construction progress and ensuring construction progress, traffic efficiency, and traffic safety. Route guidance is a key method of traffic diversion, but its diversion effectiveness is often difficult to be predicted. This paper proposes a method to analyze the effectiveness of route guidance in expressway reconstruction and expansion projects in China. First, evolutionary game theory is employed to build a decision-making model for drivers facing the route guidance recommendations. Replicated dynamic equation is used to reveal the evolutionary law of driver decision-making over time. Secondly, the cost matrix is quantified based on the typical conditions of expressway reconstruction and expansion practices in China. Thirdly, the evolutionary stable points are solved and analyzed. The results indicate that two types of stable points emerge in evolutionary games under route guidance. The first type arises when the detour coefficient of the receiving road is excessively high or the road and traffic conditions are exceptionally poor, resulting in an evolutionary stable point of 0, which indicates route guidance failure. The second type occurs when the detour coefficient of the receiving road is relatively low and the road and traffic conditions are good, resulting in an evolutionary stable point between 0 and 1, indicating that route guidance will impact only a subset of drivers. Finally, numerical analysis of results under different parameter values is conducted, and the application value of the research conclusion in expressway reconstruction and expansion is discussed.