2005 Volume 6 Pages 2108-2123
Queue spillback is a common phenomenon in congested transportation networks. Nevertheless, traditionally, dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) problems are developed with the point-queue concept in which queue spillback is not captured. Indeed, one recent focus in DTA research is to capture this phenomenon and develop solution methods for the physical-queue DTA formulations. However, the properties of these problems, which have important implications on the theoretical advances and computational issues on transportation planning and operations, are not well recognized and understood. This paper summarizes the properties of physical-queue DTA, compares those with point-queue DTA, and discusses their implications. In particular, the interrelationship among properties including First-In-First-Out, causality, travel-time-link-flow consistency, and queue spillback are emphasized in this paper.
