Equilibrium Assignments in Competitive and Cooperative Traffic Flow Routing

The goal of the paper is to demonstrate possibilities of collaborative transportation network to minimize total travel time of the network users. Cooperative and competitive traffic flow assignment systems in case of m ≥2 navigation providers (Navigators) are compared. Each Navigator provides travel guidance for its customers (users) on the non-general topology network of parallel links. In both cases the main goals of Navigators are to minimize travel time of their users but the behavioral strategies are different. In competitive case the behavioral strategy of each Navigator is to minimize travel time of traffic flow of its navigation service users while in cooperative case – to minimize travel time of overall traffic flow. Competitive routing is formalized mathematically as a non-zero sum game and cooperative routing is formulated as an optimization problem. It is demonstrated that Nash equilibrium in the navigation game appears to be not Pareto optimal. Eventually it is shown that cooperative routing systems in smart transportation networked environments could give users less value of travel time than competitive one.