Continuum Dynamic Traffic Assignment Model for Autonomous Vehicles in a Polycentric Urban City with Environmental Consideration

This paper proposed a continuum dynamic model for autonomous vehicles in a polycentric urban city by considering the environment impact of traffic emission. The model assumes that homogeneous autonomous vehicles are continuously distributed over the urban areas which tend to choose a path to minimize their total travel cost from origin to destination. To describe the path choice behavior of travelers, we presented the continuum dynamic traffic assignment model which consists of a two-dimensional hyperbolic system of nonlinear conservation laws with source terms and an Eikonal-type equation. The elastic demand is considered using a function which associating each copy of flow with its total instantaneous travel cost. For the environmental impacts, here we consider the influence of emission and include the cost of emission into the actual transportation cost. A solution algorithm for the model is designed as a cell-centered finite volume method for conservation law equations and a fast sweeping method for Eikonal-type equations on unstructured grids. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the model and the proposed solution algorithm. Further, the results of the travel cost considering emissions and not considering emissions are compared.