Date of Award

12-17-2015

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.Sc.

Department

Mechanical, Automotive, and Materials Engineering

Keywords

congestion pricing, road bottleneck, system cost optimization, value of time

Supervisor

Guo, Xiaolei

Supervisor

Zhang, Guoqing

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

We study the morning commute problem with a peak period flat toll, where the toll has a maximum acceptable toll level and a maximum acceptable length of tolling period. Under such a constrained optimization setup, we investigate the system cost minimization problem. A tolling scheme is determined by the toll starting time, the toll ending time, and the toll level. The toll starting time and ending time are set before and after the common work start time, respectively. We find out that, under the toll window length constraint only, a balanced toll window design is always optimal, where “balanced” means that the part of the toll window before the work start time and the part after have equal monetary value. Under both the toll level and the toll window length constraints, the balanced design is optimal if feasible; otherwise the toll should start later with the same toll window length.

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