Professor Boyce was honored with a special award on the 50th anniversary of the Japan Section of the RSAI for his paper, "Predicting Road Traffic Route Flows Uniquely for Urban Transportation Planning, " published in the  Studies in Regional Science, vol.42, no.1, The 50th Anniversary Special Issue.

Dr. David Boyce is an expert of transportation planning. He has been solong time engaged in practical urban transportation planning in large urbanareas including Chicago in US as well as he has actively participated ininternational scholarly meetings of regional science, transportation planning,urban and regional planning, and so on.

The traffic assignment model, which was developed by him and his heirsin the field of Transportation Engineering, had a great affect on practice andtheory in the field of urban transportation planning in Japan in 1970’s. Themethodology was based on stochastic probability theory. In this sense, at thebeginning it was taken as extraneous one from the view point of economistsbecause their methodology is, on the other hand, largely dependent on microdeterministic behavioral approach.

This paper has successfully improved traditional traffic route assignmentmethodology through introduction of concept of entropy and potentialfunction into the traditional route assignment model, and has provided arobust theoretical basis for the developed methodology by showing marginalconditions for equilibrium traffic flows at all links. It is more consistent withmicro behavioral approach traditionally adopted by the economists.