01558347

Component

Two new numerical methods, an exact method and a semi-analytical method, are proposed in this paper for solving the step-tolled user equilibrium problem for the bottleneck model with general user heterogeneity. The exact method locates the equilibrium solution by enumerating all possible combinations of user departure orders. To improve computational efficiency, a simple heuristic is developed to reduce the number of solutions to be enumerated. The semi-analytical method, on the other hand, transforms the step-tolled user equilibrium problem into a static, asymmetric traffic assignment problem with side constraints, which is formulated and solved as a variational inequality problem. The authors' numerical experiments show that both the heuristic version of the exact method and the semi-analytical method are computationally efficient and always produce identical equilibrium solutions. Using these methods, two examples of step-tolled bottleneck models with heterogenous users are tested. The results suggest that the optimal step toll schemes are not unique and that ignoring user heterogeneity may lead to sub-optimal step toll design. The authors also find that the efficiency of a single step toll seems not very sensitive to the design parameters.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB30 Transportation Network Modeling.

01550057

15-5574

English

18p

2015

Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Bottlenecks; Heuristic methods; Mathematical models; Traffic equilibrium; Variable tolls

Finance; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; I10: Economics and Administration; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2015 Paper #15-5574

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 30 2014 1:52PM