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Transportation Network Analysis by M. G. H. Bell and Y. Iida, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, U.K., 1997, 226 pp. ($90 US).
The stated motivation for this book is to present a unified theoretical framework for transportation network analysis. The selected framework is static equilibrium analysis, extended in some cases by linking consecutive time slices with queues.
The authors are to be congratulated in providing a contribution to the transportation science literature that is accessible and potentially useful to graduate students in operations research, transportation engineering, and related fields, as well as to researchers and advanced practitioners. The book can serve as a point of entry to the study of transportation networks, especially urban roadway systems. It also serves as a primer to a more advanced and comprehensive book by PATRIKSSON (1994) on selected aspects of the subject.
The book consists of eight chapters plus an Introduction and Conclusions. Basic concepts of network analysis are covered in a preliminary manner in the Introduction, and in more detail in the next three chapters. Chapter 2, Transportation Networks, introduces the reader to the principal terminology, variables, relationships, and assumptions. Chapter 3. Optimality, informally introduces matrix algebra and constrained optimization mathematics necessary for an initial exploration of...