TRANSPORTATION NETWORK DESIGN BASED ON NETWORK FLEXIBILITY AND REGRET THEORY

Transportation networks are essential infrastructures of the present societies and are progressively growing in importance. Therefore, the network should develop in accordance with the society's needs. Transportation network expansion is a costly process and often is not returnable. Usually, there are not enough resources to satisfy the hole future demand; therefore, available resources must be utilized in an efficient manner. It has been shown that classic transportation planning approach and decision theory should be revised and a more flexible planning approach must be taken to deal with the uncertainties and the internal or external changes. The concept of flexibility has been used in many scientific disciplines including transportation planning. Most of the studies of network flexibility have focused on the concept of capacity flexibility. Network flexibility can be considered as an effective factor in network reliability. A network should be flexible enough to be considered as a reliable one. In this study, a model of transportation network design has been developed based on increasing the flexibility, especially increasing the survivability of the network facing daily variations including daily crashes or rush-hour blockings. Network survivability is the ratio of the demand that will be answered after the occurrence of a failure in a network. Improving the properties of a network will affect the flow pattern all around the network. In most studies, utility theory has been used to model user answer to realize the model to a greater degree. It has been shown that utility theory faces basic shortcomings and regret theory has been introduced as an alternative way to handle the users' behavior. In this study, a stochastic user equilibrium has been developed based on regret theory to model the user reply to the network expansion. Results show that the network improves based on the survivability model, which has better performance when a link is blocked.