An Efficient Algorithm for Continuous Bi-Criteria Traffic Assignment

Computing Equilibrium with Heterogeneous User Preferences The authors address a long-standing challenge in transportation network modeling: how travelers choose routes in congested networks when balancing multiple route attributes, some of which are naturally continuous. Their new algorithm decomposes this complex problem into a sequence of intuitive route-level adjustments based on implicit boundaries of continuous attributes. This enables the model to capture detailed route-level decisions that have been difficult to compute at scale in such settings. The results show that the new method significantly outperforms existing approaches, often delivering speedups of an order of magnitude. Beyond computational gains, the study also establishes rigorous convergence guarantees and demonstrates the advantages of working directly with a continuous formulation as opposed to conventional discretization-based methods. The work opens the door to more realistic and scalable modeling of transportation systems with behaviorally heterogeneous users.