Experimental Investigation of Day-to-Day Route-Choice Behaviour and Network Simulations of Autobahn Traffic in North Rhine-Westphalia

In this article an attempt is made to close the gap between network wide traffic simulations and resulting forecasts on the one hand and the driver’s behavior as a reaction on his daily experience on the other hand. The first part reports on laboratory experiments involving 200 times repeated interactive choices between two routes. In one condition feedback on travel time was supplied for the chosen round only and in a second one for both rounds. Mean values are near to game theoretic equilibrium but substantial fluctuations persist up to the end. Fluctuations are smaller and payoffs are greater it feedback is given for both roads. There is a negative correlation between a subject’s number of road changes and payoffs. Two types of behavior are observed. A direct responder is attracted to the road which was less crowded in the previous period whereas a contrarian shows the opposite pattern. The second part deals with a description of the progress achieved in the development of cellular automata models of vehicular traffic. The most recent models are able to reproduce free flow, spontaneous jam formation, synchronized traffic, as well as metastability. Here the implementation of this model to simulate the traffic on the autobahn network in North Rhine-Westphalia is described and some of the challenges of such a huge and topologically complex network are discussed.