Reliability Analysis of Highway Network Travel Time Based on Information Entropy Model and Electronic Toll Collection Data

Abstract

Travel time reliability (TTR) holds significant importance as an evaluation index in the transportation industry. To simplify TTR calculations at the network level in engineering applications, this paper re-examines the highway network from the perspective of system theory, regards it as a road network system consisting of multiple subsystems, and proposes a framework for calculating the TTR of the highway network based on the information entropy model. The information entropy model is employed to quantify the level of disorder within the temporal distribution, thereby substituting the need for fitting or deducing the distribution function as practiced in conventional methodologies. The design of roadway indicators considers the social attributes of the transportation network, making reliability not solely dependent on temporal data. For the case study, we used data from the electronic toll collection gantry system on the Xi’an bypass highway. The results indicate that the TTR of the inner ring within the ring network is significantly higher than that of the outer ring. Furthermore, the reliability of the network is lower than that of any sub-section, during both peak and off-peak hours. The applicability of the proposed computational framework is demonstrated and the nature of the results is explored in comparisons with traditional metrics and time prediction attempts. The approach to the TTR evaluation problem from a novel perspective presented in this research omits the procedure of fitting the time distribution function and avoids being affected by its heterogeneity, making TTR calculation and extension more efficient and convenient.