CONGESTION PRICING, HETEROGENEOUS USERS AND TRAVEL TIME RELIABILITY: MULTI-CRITERION DYNAMIC USER EQUILIBRIUM MODEL AND EFFICIENT IMPLEMENTATION FOR LARGE-SCALE NETWORKS

摘要

With increasing interest in road pricing strategies to alleviate congestion and improvenetwork performance, this study develops a multi-criterion dynamic user equilibrium (MDUE)traffic assignment model which explicitly considers heterogeneous users that seek to minimizethree essential decision attributes: travel time, out-of-pocket cost, and travel time reliability inthe underlying path choice framework. The value of time (VOT) in this study is treated as acontinuous random variable distributed across the population of trip-makers, and travel timereliability is estimated at a path level. Furthermore, the proposed MDUE model is capable ofconsidering different vehicle classes, namely low occupancy vehicles (LOV) and high occupancyvehicles (HOV); thus, with greater realism in trip-makers’ path choice behavior, the MDUEmodel is applicable to analyze a variety of road pricing scenarios. To address the practicalapplication aspects for large-scale congested networks, novel implementation techniques areproposed to overcome computational obstacles to real world application. An application to theNew York metropolitan regional network is demonstrated, and a set of numerical experimentsare conducted on this network to explore the convergence behavior, solution quality and requiredcomputational time of the MDUE algorithm.