Network performance evaluation under disruptive events through a progressive traffic assignment model

The purpose of this paper is to present an assignment model as a basis for evaluating the performance of a traffic network, capable of describing its evolution immediately after the occurrence of a disruptive event. First of all, a User-Equilibrium traffic assignment problem is solved in order to obtain an estimation of the system state before the disruption. Starting from the critical event, a Progressive Assignment procedure is performed in order to obtain reasonable traffic assignments on the network, taking into account the users' tolerance to increases in travel times as well as the inherent inertia of the system. Therefore a metric for the description of the network performance is proposed as well as implementation of the model on a test network.