Abstract:

To improve the utilization of highway resources and the traffic situation in parallel national and provincial roads, in this study, the interests of highway operators and users was comprehensively accounted; a differentiated toll pricing model with the upper-level objective of increasing highway operating revenues and the lower-level objective of achieving multiclass stochastic traffic network equilibrium was established; and a model incorporating the genetic algorithm, simulated annealing algorithm, and iterative weighting method was developed. Based on the analysis of the traffic characteristics of the Longqing highway and its parallel national and provincial roads in the Shandong Province, the proposed model was used to develop differential toll schemes for entrance and exit sections, time periods, and vehicle types on the highway. The results show that the optimal differentiated tolling schemes can increase the operating revenue of the Longqing highway in the north-south direction by 7861900 yuan/year and reduce the travel cost of the road network by 7 165 100 yuan/year, which confirms the practicality of the proposed model and the effectiveness of the multimode differentiated tolling schemes for highways.

Key words: highway, differentiated tolling, bi-level programming, generalized cost functions, multiclass stochastic traffic network equilibrium, genetic algorithm, simulated annealing algorithm, iterative weighting method