Braess's Paradox Examples - Multiple Origin-Destination Pairs

Jane Hagstrom
University of Illinois at Chicago

When citations are not given, please attribute these examples to this web site.

A Strong Braess Paradox

Network of Triangles with Stongly Monotone Costs 3 commodities. Demand between each o/d pair is 2. Cost relationships among Arcs 4, 5, and 6, and among Arcs 7, 8, and 9 are the same as those among Arcs 1, 2, and 3. In order to obtain cheaper travel times than in equilibrium, the 3 commodities must cooperate. This example has the interesting property that all links can be made cheaper than in equilibrium. Appears in Characterizing Braess's Paradox for Traffic Networks, J. N. Hagstrom and R. A. Abrams, Proceedings of IEEE 2001 Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems 837-842. Link to Excel file.

Sioux Falls Study Network

526 OD pairs. Original data and equilibrium solution from H. Bar-Gera, Transportation Network Test Problems, 2002, http://www.bgu.ac.il/~bargera/tntp/. Appears in R. A. Abrams and J. N. Hagstrom, Improving Traffic Flows at No Cost, Mathematical and Computational Models for Congestion Pricing, S. Lawphongpanich, D. W. Hearn, M. J. Smith, editors, Springer, 2006. Link to documentation.

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Revised, 8/11/06 , by Jane Hagstrom.