Paradigms of modeling advanced traveler information services

Many studies have been undertaken to model the benefits of advanced traveler information systems. Most of them are based on the use of static models for an essentially dynamic problem. This study develops a dynamic traffic assignment model, compares and contrasts the static versus the dynamic modeling paradigms for this problem. The numerical study indicates that some aspects of the results from these two paradigms could be diametrical. The discrepancy is mainly attributed to the fundamental characteristic of a model-how traffic is represented. It appears that simplifications from the physical queue representation are inadequate in producing correct results.