19: Algorithms for Solving the Probit Path-Based Stochastic User Equilibrium Traffic Assignment Problem with One or More User Classes

Path-based traffic assignment has recently received much attention after years of almost exclusive focus on link-based methods which, using implicit path enumeration rules, relieve the models of the behavioural and computational burden of explicitly enumerating a number of possible routes between the origin-destination (OD) pairs considered.

The interest in path-based methods is not new. But the practical implementation of path-based algorithms for real size networks on desktop computers has become feasible only recently, having been hampered in the past by the lack and the cost of RAM which computers use in large quantity to deal with a path-based representation of the assignment problem. A further issue which hampered the adoption of this sort of method was the need for a technique to explicitly enumerate limited but relevant and sufficient sets of paths between each OD pair. However, since Daganzo and Sheffi (1977) suggested that path enumeration could perhaps be carried out by people, several such techniques have been proposed and tested (e.g. Ben Akiva et al., 1984; De La Barra et al., 1993; Cascetta et al., 1996, 1997).