Exploration of day-to-day route choice models by a virtual experiment

This paper examines existing day-to-day models based on a virtual day-to-day route choice experiment using the latest mobile internet techniques. With the realized day-to-day path flows and path travel times in the experiment, we calibrate several well-designed path-based day-to-day models who take the Wardrop’s user equilibrium as (part of) their stationary states. The nonlinear effects of path flows and path time differences on the path swapping are then investigated. Participants’ path preferences, time-varying sensitivity and learning behavior in the day-to-day process are also examined. The prediction power of various models with various settings (nonlinear effects, time-varying sensitivity, and learning) is compared. Assumption of rational behavior adjustment process in Yang and Zhang (2009) is further verified. Finally, evolutions of different Lyapunov functions used in the literature are plotted and no obvious diversity is observed.