Network Capacity Reliability Analysis Considering Traffic Regulation after a Major Disaster

The focuses of this paper are optimal traffic regulation after a major disaster and evaluation of capacity reliability of a network. The paper firstly discusses the context of traffic regulation and its importance after a major disaster. Then, this problem is formulated as an optimisation program in which the traffic regulator attempts to regulate the amount of traffic movements or access to some areas so as to maximise the traffic volumes in the network while (a) link flows must be less than link capacities and (b) re-routing effect due to changes of traffic condition in the network is allowed. The re-routing behaviour is assumed to follow Probit Stochastic User's Equilibrium (SUE). The paper explains an optimisation algorithm based on an implicit programming approach for solving this problem with the SUE condition. With this optimisation problem, the randomness of the link capacities (to represent random effects of the disaster) is introduced and the paper describes an approach to approximate the capacity reliability of the network using Monte-Carlo simulation. The paper then adopts this approach to evaluate the performances of different traffic regulation policies with a small network and a test network of Kobe city in Japan. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006