Transportation Network Flexibility Assessment Based on Reserve Capacity

There are many uncertain factors in the demand and supply of urban traffic network. Transportation network flexibility can describe the road network’s ability to process or absorb changes caused by uncertainty, and can be used for transportation network performance evaluation. Based on the concept of reserve capacity, two assessment methods of transportation network capacity flexibility were analyzed. The first method only considers the link capacity constraints; the second method, on the basis of the first method, considers the influence of level of service, this method has more application value because it cannot only get the network biggest reserve capacity flexibility like the first method, but also get the network capacity flexibility of each level of service. Finally, a specific example of the two methods for validation and analysis was given.