A theoretical multimodal assignment model for simulating intermodal trips

The objective of this paper is to propose a hyper-network model for simulating intermodal trips, such as park-and-ride trips, assuming elastic travel demand as regards mode choice. In particular, user flows on both road and transit networks can be estimated by the proposed model that is based on dummy links, with suitable cost functions, which are able to simulate virtually ‘on-network’ modal split and transfer operations. In particular, the authors of the paper state that with these suitable functions, mathematical equivalence is ensured between the results obtained on the hypernetwork and those obtained by applying a general assignment model with elastic demand at mode choice level.