Dynamic Continuum Model with Elastic Demand for a Polycentric Urban City

This paper presents the development of a macroscopic dynamic traffic assignment model for continuum transportation systems with elastic demand. A reactive dynamic user equilibrium model is extended to simulate network equilibrium problems for an urban area with multiple central business districts (CBDs). Each copy of traffic flow reactively makes route choice decisions to minimize the total travel cost from origin to destination, based on instantaneous traffic information from a radio broadcasting service or route guidance system. The elastic demand function for each copy of flow is associated with its total instantaneous travel cost. The model is solved by a cell‐centered finite volume method for conservation law equations and a fast sweeping method for Eikonal‐type equations on unstructured grids. Numerical experiments for an urban traffic network with two CBDs are presented to verify the rationality of the model and the validity of the numerical method. The numerical results indicate that the model captures some macroscopic characteristics of two copies of flow interacting in time‐varying urban transportation systems, e.g., the spatial distributions of the flow density and flux and the path choice behavior in response to elastic demand, and can describe traffic equilibrium phenomena, such as self‐organization and traffic congestion build‐up and dissipation.