Day-to-day route choice and congestion management under information heterogeneity

We propose a dynamical system model to formulate the day-to-day route choice of travelers with heterogeneous travel information. Heterogeneous travelers know distinct sets of route options between the same origin–destination (OD) pair, and each class of travelers restrict their route choices to those that they experience or acquire. The proposed model is applied to examine the effect of three factors, including heterogeneous information, marginal-cost tolls, and information release, on traffic system performance. The analytical and numerical results indicate that the stationary state of the model is equivalent to the information-constrained user equilibrium (ICUE) state. While a marginal-cost toll implementation can reduce the total travel time costs to a certain extent, it may paradoxically lead to higher congestion levels at the stationary state. A combined scheme integrating marginal-cost tolls and targeted information release, along with its one extended variation, offers a viable approach to achieving the system optimum (SO) for traffic networks.