An Efficient Method for Computing Traffic Equilibria in Networks with Asymmetric Transportation Costs

In the presence of several user categories or transportation modes, or when transportation costs on each arc of a network depend on the flows on adjacent arcs, the traffic equilibrium problem may be expressed as a variational problem. Methods for determining traffic equilibria are then adaptations of techniques for solving variational inequalities. In this paper, we present a new convex optimization formulation for the general traffic equilibrium problem, and propose a simple iterative method for calculating traffic equilibria, which essentially involves postoptimizing a linear sub-problem at each iteration. Preliminary computational results are reported.