Measuring network reliability: A game theoretic approach

Despite the importance of assessing the reliability of transport networks in general there is a paucity of suitable techniques. In part this is due to the fact that network performance depends both on the state of the infrastructure and on the behaviour of network users, where user behaviour is governed by expectations about the state of the network. An approach based on game theory is proposed whereby the performance of the network is estimated for the case where network users are extremely pessimistic about the state of the network. Where the routes are prespecified and route utilities depend only on exogenously given scenarios, the estimation problem may be formulated as a linear program. A reformulation of the problem as a non-linear program allows the impact of the degree of user pessimism on expected network utility to be studied. The problems of implementing the method for large networks with multiple origins and destinations is discussed and an algorithm is proposed.