A theoretical multimodal assignment model for simulating intermodal trips

This paper proposes 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 which is based on dummy links, with suitable cost functions, which are able to simulate virtually ‘on-network’ modal split and transfer operations. In particular, we state that, with these suitable functions, mathematical equivalence is ensured between the results obtained on the hyper-network and those obtained by applying a general assignment model with elastic demand at mode choice level.