Simulation-based pricing optimization for improving network-wide travel time reliability

ABSTRACTTravel time variability in a network is an important measure of the transportation system performance and a major factor influencing the decision-making of system management such as congestion pricing. The congestion-pricing problem with reliability maximization as the goal of a transportation network is characterized by expensive-to-evaluate objective functions without closed forms. In this paper, an effective simulation-based optimization (SBO) method is utilized to solve the problem. The network reliability is measured by a weighted average link travel time coefficient of variation (CV) with link traffic flows as the weights. We employ DynusT to evaluate the system reliability as the objective function corresponding to different toll charges for a new toll road in Maryland. The results show that the two optimal toll charge strategies improve the network-wide reliability, reducing the weighted travel time CV by 9.60% and 1.16%, respectively, when compared to the baseline toll.