The general traffic equilibrium problem in a stochastic network with travellers' risk aversion and inaccurate perceptions

We study the general traffic equilibrium problem through a stochastic network in which travellers perceive inaccurately probabilistic arc travel times and use disutility functions to evaluate path perceived travel times. The objective is to determine the arc equilibrium flows when each trip-maker travels along the perceived optimal path which minimises the perceived expected disutility. A fixed point formulation for this general problem is presented in which flows are defined through paths. The problem is difficult to solve exactly due to the non-additive path cost structure of the perceived expected disutility function. However, we introduce a solution strategy that, without requiring a complete path enumeration, can approximate the arc flows. Extensive computational experiments are performed to investigate the effects of various factors on travellers' route choice decisions, and to demonstrate that the proposed approach provides good quality flows in a very reasonable amount of time.