Biography: Dr. Hillel Bar-Gera is a tenured Senior Lecturer of Industrial Engineering and Management at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel. His Ph.D. thesis on the origin-based assignment algorithm won the 2000 dissertation award for best Ph.D. thesis in transportation from the Transportation Science Section of INFORMS. He has been a faculty member at Ben-Gurion University since 2001. He received his B.Sc. in Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science as well as his M.Sc. in Mathematics from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. He received his Ph.D. in Civil and Materials Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He serves as a member of the Intelligent Transportation Systems Committee of the Transportation Research Board, and as an Associate Editor of the journal Networks and Spatial Economics.

In this research we experiment with a new algorithmic approach that focuses on local paired alternative route segments. The approach relies on a fundamental understanding that paired alternative segments "capture" the essence of route choices in the UE model in an extremely compact manner.

Traffic Assignment by Paired Alternative Segments (TAPAS) is superior to previous algorithms in several respects. First, it converges to equilibrium very quickly, as we demonstrate with several large-scale networks. In that respect it is a competitive candidate relative to other recent alternatives. In addition, the set of routes used by the method is relatively consistent throughout the iterative process, thus it allows achieving reasonable consistency even at moderate levels of convergence. Last, but not least, while certain aspects of the algorithm rely on non-trivial theoretical insights, the key principle is rather simple and likely to be widely understood by the general professional transportation community.