Potential degradation of transportation network efficiency due to route recommendations

In this work, we propose a road traffic model to assess the effects of real-time route recommendations on the traffic flow between an origin and a destination connected by two possible routes. We suppose that this origin-destination pair is subject to a constant demand flow and that a certain fraction of the users constituting this demand has access to a navigation application (app). The model aims to investigate potential drawbacks, at the global level, of the usage of navigation apps. After a comprehensive stability analysis, we show that an excessive use of navigation apps can degrade of the network efficiency, which may take the form of a decrease of performance measures or of the failure to satisfy the user demand.