Surrogate-based optimisation of toll levels in congestion pricing schemes

• There has recently been a growing interest in analysing road pricing schemes in urban areas using dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) tools. Finding optimal toll levels in cordon based road pricing schemes has so far mainly been studied using either derivative-free heuristics or ascent methods. For future use of DTA tools such methods are not suitable and in this paper we investigate how a surrogate modelling framework can be used instead. We focus on cases when the number of costly objective function evaluations is limited to between 20 and 40. In order to allow a large number of different configurations of the surrogate modelling framework to be evaluated, a static user equilibrium model is used for simulating the road users’ response to a given pricing scheme. The results show that for a realistic scenario, valuable information on close to optimal toll levels can be achieved with only 20 costly function evaluations.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Samhällsbyggnadsteknik -- Transportteknik och logistik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Civil Engineering -- Transport Systems and Logistics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

congestion pricing

road pricing

surrogate-based optimization

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)