Construct · 3 fields · 4 citations
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Braess's paradox is the counterintuitive result that adding a new link (or capacity) to a congested network in which users choose their own routes can make travel worse for everyone, because self-interested routing shifts onto the new link in a way that raises total delay. Braess's 1968 Über ein Paradoxon aus der Verkehrsplanung (translated in 2005 as On a paradox of traffic planning) first showed it for road traffic. The referent is the degradation of a user-equilibrium flow network when an edge is added, and the same construct, in our reading supported by the sources below, reappears in physical and in data networks.[1][2]
The same paradox appears in physical networks. Cohen and Horowitz's 1991 Paradoxical behaviour of mechanical and electrical networks showed that adding a connecting spring to a hanging-weight assembly can make it rise rather than fall, and that an analogous rewiring of a resistor network can reduce the current it carries. The construct is identical to the traffic case, that adding a path to a flow network can worsen the global outcome, realised here in springs and circuits governed by minimum-energy equilibria, and measured by displacement or current rather than travel time.[3]
In communication networks where flows are routed non-cooperatively, the same paradox holds: adding a link or capacity can degrade overall performance because selfish routing redistributes traffic badly. Korilis, Lazar, and Orda's 1999 Avoiding the Braess paradox in non-cooperative networks studies when upgrades help and when they backfire, and how to add capacity so they do not. It is the identical construct as the traffic and physical cases, a capacity addition harming a self-routed flow network, here measured by network delay or throughput.[4]
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