Dynamic Traffic Models in Transportation Science (Dagstuhl Seminar 22192)

Abstract

Traffic assignment models are crucial for transport planners to be able to predict the congestion, environmental and social impacts of transport policies, for example in the light of possible changes to the infrastructure, to the transport services offered, or to the prices charged to travellers. The motivation for this series of seminars - of which this seminar was the third - is the prevalence in the transportation community of basing such predictions on complex computer-based simulations that are capable of resolving many elements of a real systems, while on the other hand, the theory of dynamic traffic assignments (in terms of equilibrium existence, computability and efficiency) had not matured to the point matching the model complexity inherent in simulations.
Progress has been made on this issue in the first two seminars (Dagstuhl Seminar 15412 and 18102), by bringing together leading scientists in the areas of traffic simulation, algorithmic game theory and dynamic traffic assignment. We continued this process this seminar. Moreover, we started to address the growing real-life challenge of new kinds of 'mobility service' emerging, before the tools are available to incorporate them in such planning models. These services include intelligent/dynamic ride-sharing and car-sharing, through to fully autonomous vehicles, provided potentially by a variety of competing operators.