Static congestion pricing considering the cumulative impact of day-to-day dynamics with Weibit adjustment process

Abstract

Static pricing is currently the most prevalent form of congestion pricing. Most existing methods for static pricing design use equilibrium-based indices as the optimization objective function. However, in reality, the equilibrium may not be reached within the toll planning horizon, and thus equilibrium-based pricing schemes might be ineffective in alleviating traffic congestion. To address this issue, this paper proposes a new method for the optimal static congestion pricing design. Specifically, we propose a new measure called cumulative network performance (CNP) as the optimization objective function. The CNP measure explicitly considers the fluctuation in network performance over the toll planning horizon, instead of only focusing on the performance at the equilibrium state. To capture the effect of static congestion pricing on CNP, we introduce a day-to-day dynamic model with the Weibit-based route flow adjustment, which can overcome the drawbacks of the user equilibrium or Logit-based route-choice criterion that are used in most current day-to-day dynamic models. Numerical experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness and advantages of the toll scheme resulting from the proposed method.

KEYWORDS:

• Static congestion pricing
• Weibit model
• day-to-day dynamics
• cumulative network performance
• network equilibrium

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China: [Grant Number U1764261; 72021002; 72071174]; the Shanghai Rising-Star Program: [Grant Number 20QA1409800], the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region: [Project No. 15222221], and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.