Abstract:

From the investigation into the current situations of the highway network toll collection in some underdeveloped regions with low transportation flows, it has been found that the charging on all the roads that can be tolled may results in the loss of some toll roads. Therefore, during the determination of the optimal network toll rate, the toll location should be optimized at the same time. In this paper, a bi-level programming model is proposed to solve the combined optimization of the toll location and the toll rate for highway network, the upper objective of which is the maximum consumer surplus while the lower one is the equilibrium of multi-vehicle stochastic users with elastic demands. Moreover, the genetic-annealing algorithm is adopted to overcome the complexity and difficulty in the optimization process. The results of a numerical example show that the proposed model is reasonable and effective in the combined optimization of toll location and toll rate.

Key words: highway network toll collection, toll rate, optimization model, hi-level programming model, genetic algorithm, simulated annealing algorithm