Modeling traffic flow on a comprehensive network with competition and cooperation between urban logistic alliances.

The traffic during rush hour in metropolises is always in heavy congestion, so the wagon trucks of logistic transportation are mostly forbidden during rush hour. In fact, quite a few logistic transportations are fulfilled by converted passenger vehicles. This paper aims to model the logistic companies' behaviors and see through the effect of their cooperation modes on the companies and on the whole traffic conditions. The logistic companies decide their transportation pricing, warehouse using and route choosing separately or as a group (cooperation) to compete with others. It is also assumed that the heavy freight vehicles, light freight vehicles and the auto vehicles share the same network. Three models based on variational inequalities are proposed to describe the companies' behaviors when there is no cooperation, simple cooperation and deep cooperation, respectively, and the modified diagonalization method is used to solve these models. The total transportation demand is elastic, which depends on the users' choice of logistics company and further depends on all the companies' prices, warehouse and route choices. The goodness of different coalitions to the companies and the whole traffic system is well investigated in the numerical examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]