Simulated Route Decision Behaviour: Simple Heuristics and Adaptation

In modern societies, drivers increasingly experience traffic jams that not only cause pollution but also increase the cost of commuting. Hence, one challenge to researchers dealing with traffic management is to find efficient ways to model and predict traffic flow. Due to the social nature of traffic, most of the decisions are not independent, thus drivers have to somehow co-ordinate their actions. Although there are already systems designed to assist drivers in these tasks (broadcast, internet, etc.), such systems do not consider or even have a model of the way drivers decide. We aim at simulating various forms of driver decisions. For validation we want to compare our simulation results with empirical data from real experiments whose results are reported elsewhere. Here we present a naive model for the route choice adaptation of learning commuters with heuristics based behaviour. In simulation experiments they compete in a given scenario. Our results show that the heuristics used, lead to a situation similar to that obtained in the real experiments, especially concerning the route commitment and adaptation to equilibrium states.