Effect of transfer costs on traffic dynamics of multimodal transportation networks

The study of traffic dynamics on complex networks has attracted much attention due to its practical role in transportation networks. Different transportation networks, such as aviation, railway, and road networks, are combined to form the multimodal transportation network. On the multimodal transportation network, the transfer cost, which is required for changing the mode of transportation, is one of the factors affecting the network traffic dynamics. Therefore, this paper focuses on the traffic dynamics on a multimodal transportation network considering transfer costs and analyzes the impact of transfer costs on network throughput. The simulation results show that the multimodal transportation network with low transfer cost has a higher throughput compared to the network without transfer cost. Meanwhile, high transfer cost significantly restricts transfer, which reduces the network throughput. To achieve the maximum network throughput, the optimal ratio of economic cost and time cost with the consideration of transfer cost is found through theoretical analysis in this paper.