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A Dual Variable Approximation Based Heuristic for Dynamic Congestion Pricing

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Abstract

This work presents a heuristic combining dual variable approximation techniques and the method of successive average to determine the time-varying tolls in a general transportation network. The dual approximation techniques exploit the linear programming structure of the underlying assignment problem which uses the cell transmission model to propagate the traffic dynamics. Both the first best and second best time-varying tolls can be determined in a computationally efficient manner with the proposed heuristic. Numerical experiments are conducted on two networks of different sizes to show the efficacy of the heuristic. From the experiments conducted, the proposed heuristic obtains the solutions with the maximum optimality gap of 2.03%.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the constructive comments by Professor Giulio Erberto Cantarella, Professor Mike Smith and Professor Benjamin Heydecker. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material remain the sole responsibility of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Transportation and Communication Management Science, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1 University Road, Tainan City, 70101, Taiwan

    Dung-Ying Lin

  2. College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, West Virginia University, PO Box 6103, Morgantown, WV, 26506-6103, USA

    Avinash Unnikrishnan

  3. Department of Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, C1761, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    S. Travis Waller

Authors
  1. Dung-Ying Lin
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  2. Avinash Unnikrishnan
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  3. S. Travis Waller
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Correspondence to Dung-Ying Lin.

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Lin, DY., Unnikrishnan, A. & Waller, S.T. A Dual Variable Approximation Based Heuristic for Dynamic Congestion Pricing. Netw Spat Econ 11, 271–293 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11067-009-9124-9

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