Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 918405, 16 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/918405
Research Article

Dynamics of a Transportation Network Model with Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Users

Yingguo Li,1 Zhijia Tan,2 and Qiong Chen3

1School of Mathematics and Computer Science, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou 350007, China
2School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China
3Foundation Department, PLA Communications Command Academy, Wuhan 430010, China

Received 9 March 2012; Accepted 23 April 2012

Academic Editor: Gerald Teschl

Copyright © 2012 Yingguo Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper studies the dynamics of the traveler's day-to-day route adjustment process in the general transportation network with fixed or elastic demand and homogeneous or heterogeneous users. Each traveler is assumed to adjust his/her route choice according to the excess travel cost between the instantaneous experienced travel cost and a certain referred level, which induces an aggregate path flow dynamics. We call the path flow dynamics the excess travel cost dynamics, which corresponds to the excess payoff dynamics in evolutionary games and serves a general framework of modeling the homogeneous or heterogeneous route choice behavior of travelers.