Schedule-Constrained Demand Management in Two-Region Urban Networks

Demand management aiming to optimize system cost while ensuring user compliance in an urban traffic network is a challenging task. This paper introduces a cooperative demand redistribution strategy to optimize network performance through the retiming of departure times within a limited time window. The proposed model minimizes the total time spent in a two-region urban network by incurring minimal disruption to travelers’ departure schedules. Two traffic models based on the macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) are jointly implemented to redistribute demand and analyze travelers’ reaction. First, we establish equilibrium conditions via a day-to-day assignment process, which allows travelers to find their preferred departure times. The trip-based MFD model that incorporates individual traveler attributes is implemented in the day-to-day assignment, and it is conjugated with a network-level detour ratio model to incorporate the effect of congestion in individual traveler route choice. This allows us to consider travelers with individual preferences on departure times influenced by desired arrival times, trip lengths, and earliness and lateness costs. Second, we develop a nonlinear optimization problem to minimize the total time spent considering both observed and unobserved demand—that is, travelers opting in and out of the demand management platform. The accumulation-based MFD model that builds on aggregated system representation is implemented as part of the constraints in the nonlinear optimization problem. The results confirm the resourcefulness of the model to address complex two-region traffic dynamics and to increase overall performance by reaching a constrained system optimum scenario while ensuring the applicability at both full and partial user compliance conditions.