Generalized Wardrop Principle and Its Application in Regional Transportation

Regional transportation can be regarded as a complex system consisting of many subsystems. If it is assumed that the decisions of others are known, one of the subsystems, such as a manufacturer, will make decisions from the viewpoint of individual optimal. But among these subsystems, there are noncooperative interactions. The first Wardrop principle can be used to explain the interplay between the subsystems and the second Wardrop principle to explain the internal decision making of one subsystem. To capture the feature of hierarchical behavior, classical Wardrop principles need to be generalized. The new behavior principle is named the generalized Wardrop principle. With the substitution of actual path sets for the simple links in a spatial price equilibrium network and constructing the generalized transportation cost functions, the regional transportation network equilibrium model is formulated. The new model combines the spatial price equilibrium model with the network optimization model. It can be explained by the generalized Wardrop principle and reflects the multicommodity, multimodal characteristics of regional transportation. The modified projection algorithm is used to solve the model. One numerical example is given to show the efficiency of the algorithm.