Route Choice Model Based On Prospect Theory

The forecast and description of travelers' traffic behavior, especially the route choice behavior, is the basis of traffic planning and management, and also is one of the most questions in the traffic field research. The description and modeling research for route choice behavior are hard to approach the reality because there are many uncertainties in the traffic environment when travelers make the choices. The theory which has been widely used in the route choice theory, such as random utility theory, expected utility theory, all be assumed that travelers are rational people, and seek utility maximization. While it is indicated in some scholars and experts'research that travelers incompletely seek utility maximization for route choice under uncertainty conditions, especially in risk situations, they prefer to avoid risks and reduce losses. Therefore the prospect theory is such an analysis theory of personal decision-making behavior.This paper first revealed the fact that there is uncertainty in the real traffic environments through the description of the route choice process, and then proposed prospect theory in the basis of analysis of the alternative models in route choice behavior, checked the applicability of prospect theory used for the route choice behavior by behavior survey. This article embarked from the sensitivity analysis of reference point to the prospect value, set reference point as the improvement time budget, thus, ascertained value function and probability weighting function to prospect value model of each alternative route.Thus, a user equilibrium model based on the prospect theory was constructed, which assumed the selected travel utility was equal, and equaled to the maximum prospect utility in the traffic network, then the network reached equilibrium. At last, the paper carried out an example to analysis route choice situation through the construction of road network. It draws a conclusion that the stochastic user equilibrium model based on the prospect theory is more suitable than traditional model for describing the traveler's route choice behavior.