Dynamic Traffic Assignment: Model Classifications and Recent Advances in Travel Choice Principles

Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA) has been studied for more than four decades and numerous reviews of this research area have been conducted. This review focuses on the travel choice principle and the model classifications of DTA, and is supplementary to the existing reviews. The implications of the travel choice principle for the existence and uniqueness of solutions of DTA are discussed, and the interrelation between the travel choice principle and the traffic flow component is explained using the nonlinear complementarity problem, the variational inequality problem, the mathematical programming problem, and the fixed point problem formulations. This paper also points out that all of the existing travel choice principles reviewed are extended from those used in static traffic assignment and that there are many classifications of DTA models, in which each classification addresses one aspect of DTA modeling. Finally, some future research directions are identified.