Summary and Development Trend of Traffic Equilibrium Research

摘要

Traffic congestion is a major problem currently major cities face with, and the root cause of traffic congestion is the imbalance between transportation supply and demand. This article summarizes the cognition and research status of traffic equilibrium, and analyzes the limitations and shortcomings of traffic equilibrium realization mechanism. It points out that the assumptions of existing traffic equilibrium models are too idealistic. These models are not in conformity with the conditions and processes of the equilibrium in reality, and there are drawbacks like not all-sided considering the travelers' features such as individual homogeneity, complete rationality, and perfect information, and models are hard to solve under the "top-down" solution mode, when taking time variation of traffic flow or randomness of travelers' route choice procedure into consideration. It also summarizes the new method of studying the complex adaptive system in social and economic fields and puts forward the idea and prospect that future research on the traffic equilibrium could draw lessons from the related achievements in the researches of social and economic fields. By applying complex adaptive system theory to research of traffic equilibrium and adopting research method of agent-based modeling and simulation under "bottom-up" mode, research in the following future could establish traffic equilibrium model that is in accordance with the characters of traffic participants such as individual heterogeneity, bounded rationality, incomplete information, self-organization, intelligent learning, and decision-making. It opens up a new way to research on traffic equilibrium in the perspective of complex adaptive system theory.