An Evolutionary Game of Perception-Based Stochastic User-Equilibrium in a Parallel Network

In recent years, advanced information communication technology (such as beyond 5G and 6G) will enable convenient end-to-end communication. This would allow collections of individual preferences as predictions of travellers’ perceptions, and thus support data analysis and traffic control in a dynamic circumstance. Therefore, analysis of nonlinearly modelled perceptions and perception-based user equilibrium are the necessary problem we encounter. This research explores the existence characteristics of perception-based stochastic user equilibrium (P-SUE), a type of stochastic user equilibrium where travelers make route choices according to their perceptive traffic circumstances instead of actual ones. A nonlinear perception model with stochasticity is developed and the traffic arrivals are approximately transformed from Poisson-distributed to Normal-distributed. From a static perspective, we develop a P-SUE model with a heterogeneous traveler community and discuss the interaction among travelers’ attitude, grouping and static perception-based stochastic user equilibrium (P-SSUE). After embedding a day-to-day learning process into the P-SSUE model, we further explore evolutionary dynamics of the equilibrium. Several scenarios are provided to investigate effects and sensitivity of traveler-related and road-related factors. It is found that learning produces perturbation and makes the existence condition of P-SSUE more complicated; the convergence processes of P-SSUEs are significantly shortened as the learning rate increases to higher than 0.1.