Comparison of static vehicle flow assignment methods and micro-simulations for a Personal Rapid Transit network

The objective of the present work is to verify whether the link flows computed by the static assignment methods and the averaged time varying link flows determined by the microsimulator give consistent results. If static and averaged dynamic link flows matched we would be able to verified that both, the static models and the complex microsimulator do actually produce realistic results. It is shown that the proposed static assignment can be used as a fast predictor for the average flows produced by a micro-simulator, if the trip-demand is uniform. In particular, the static flows represent a lower bound of the total vehicle flows for the micro-simulator. The static assignment gives an optimum for the empty vehicle flows and can be used as measure for the quality of the real-time empty vehicle management of the micro-simulator. The static assignment can also be used to detect bottlenecks during the network design: if statically assigned flows are above capacity limit, the micro-simulated flows surely will be above capacity limit too.