Optimization of robust area traffic control with equilibrium flow under demand uncertainty

For area traffic control road network under realization of uncertain travel demand, a robust signal setting is investigated in this paper. Due to certain hierarchy in a decision‐making order, a min–max bilevel program is proposed. A new solution method is presented to determine a Nash–Stackelberg solution where a proposed signal setting is found for area traffic control under demand uncertainty. In order to investigate the robustness of the proposed signal settings, numerical computations are performed for various initial data sets in a medium‐sized example road network. Good computational results indicated that the proposed signal settings can successfully reduce a worst‐case travel cost substantially while incurring a relatively slight loss of optimality with respect to the optimal deterministic solutions for nominal travel demands. Particularly, our computation results showed that the proposed signal settings become even attractive as demand growth increases under a worst‐case realization taken by uncertain travel demands.