Congestion Pricing, Heterogeneous Users, and Travel Time Reliability

Abstract

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