Beyond normality: A cross moment-stochastic user equilibrium model

• A new stochastic user equilibrium model that accounts for correlation in path utilities is proposed.
• This is a distributionally robust model that uses mean and covariance information.
• It is free of distributional assumptions, in particular, does not assume normality.
• An optimization approach is used to find the traffic equilibrium flow values.
• Model provides a practical alternative to the probit stochastic user equilibrium.

The Stochastic User Equilibrium (SUE) model predicts traffic equilibrium flow assuming that users choose their perceived maximum utility paths (or perceived shortest paths) while accounting for the effects of congestion that arise due to users sharing links. Inspired by recent work on distributionally robust optimization, specifically a Cross Moment (CMM) choice model, we develop a new SUE model that uses the mean and covariance information on path utilities but does not assume the particular form of the distribution. Robustness to distributional assumptions is obtained in this model by minimizing the worst-case expected cost over all distributions with fixed two moments. We show that under mild conditions, the CMM-SUE (Cross Moment-Stochastic User Equilibrium) exists and is unique. By combining a simple projected gradient ascent method to evaluate path choice probabilities with a gradient descent method to find flows, we show that the CMM-SUE is efficiently computable. CMM-SUE provides both modeling flexibility and computational advantages over approaches such as the well-known MNP-SUE (Multinomial Probit-Stochastic User Equilibrium) model that require distributional (normality) assumptions to model correlation effects from overlapping paths. In particular, it avoids the use of simulation methods employed in computations for the distribution-based MNP-SUE model. Preliminary computational results indicate that CMM-SUE provides a practical distributionally robust alternative to MNP-SUE.