Copyright © 2012 Bingfeng Si et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In this paper, the structural characteristic of urban multimodal transport system is fully analyzed and then a two-tier network structure is proposed to describe such a system, in which the first-tier network is used to depict the traveller’s mode choice behaviour and the second-tier network is used to depict the vehicle routing when a certain mode has been selected. Subsequently, the generalized travel cost is formulated considering the properties of both traveller and transport mode. A new link impedance function is proposed, in which the interferences between different vehicle flows are taken into account. Simultaneously, the bi-equilibrium patterns for multimodal transport network are proposed by extending Wardrop principle. Correspondingly, a bi-level programming model is then presented to describe the bi-equilibrium based assignment for multi-class multimodal transport network. The solution algorithm is also given. Finally, a numerical example is provided to illustrate the model and algorithm.