Network Design for Silent Link User Equilibrium

Connected vehicles (CVs) are anticipated to improve road safety and travel efficiency in a transportation system. However, the deployment of CV technologies in transportation networks can lead to privacy issues, as the communication among CVs can expose vehicles' location information. To address this issue, we introduce a privacy protection method named "silent link" to transportation networks and propose a silent link user equilibrium (SLUE) framework to study the impact of privacy protection countermeasures on network flow. A theoretical analysis regarding existence and uniqueness conditions of SLUE is provided. The proposed SLUE facilitates privacy-oriented network design to achieve optimal levels of privacy for CVs. Accordingly, a bi-level network optimization problem is formulated for the design of silent links in transportation networks. Numerical examples are demonstrated using the Braess and Sioux Falls networks.