Calculation of Urban Transportation Network Reliability Considering Correlation Among the Links Comprising a Route

Abstract

Recently, the researchers in the field of transportation network planning have become increasingly interested in network reliability, publishing research works focused on the calculation of various types of network reliability. Calculation of network reliability has led the transportation network optimizers toward new approaches where the maximization of reliability has been considered as an objective. Travel time reliability is among the most important reliabilities investigated when analyzing urban transportation networks, with various approaches based on different assumptions proposed for calculating it. In the present research, the uncertainty associated with the demand for travel and the flows passing across links and also the correlations among the links comprising a route were considered to calculate the travel time for each of the network links. Moreover, it was shown that this process follows shifted log-normal distribution. These calculations are expected to serve as a basis for the employment of travel time reliability within the modeling of an transportation system, so as to increase the accuracy and reliability of the simulations. Finally, in order to validate, an urban network with 12 nodes, 21 links, and 4 origin-destination pairs was subjected to the travel time reliability assessment by calculating the travel time over all forming links.