Modeling Departure Rates of Morning and Evening Rush Hours

To obtain the daily dynamic traffic pattern in traffic corridors, a traffic behavior based dynamic traffic assignment method is proposed in this paper. Individual travelers choose optimal departure times in morning and evening rush hours to maximize the daily net benefit, considering work schedule, traffic time and travel cost etc. By introducing marginal timing utility function, the morning and evening trips are connected through work duration. And the equilibrium traffic pattern is solved by fixed-point method. The models are implemented by numerical simulation on a simple network. It is found that traffic congestion can be alleviated, and work efficiency can be enhanced, by introducing flexible work system.