The combination of continuous network design and route guidance

•A traffic management measure combining the route guidance and the continuous network design is presented.•A path-based algorithm is given to solve system optimal problem with user constraints.•The simulated annealing algorithm is improved to solve the bi-level problem.•Results show that system performance can be improved with the route guidance measure of this paper.

In this study, a traffic management measure is presented by combining the route guidance of Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS) and the continuous network design (CNDP) to alleviate increasing traffic congestion. The route guidance recommends the travelers to choose the shortest path based on marginal travel cost and user constraints. The problem is formulated into a bi-level programming problem. The most distinct property of this problem formulation is that the feasible path set of its lower-level problem is determined by the decision variable of upper-level problem, while in conventional transportation network design problems the feasible path set for lower-level traffic assignment problem is fixed to be all the viable paths between each specific origin-destination pair. The simulated annealing algorithm is improved to solve this bi-level problem. A path-based traffic algorithm is developed to calculate the lower-level traffic assignment problem under the route guidance. Compared to the results of conventional CNDP, the measure presented in this study can better improve the transportation network performance.