The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	A methodology for solving the network toll design problem
Author:	Chen, Mei
View Online:	njit-etd1999-048 (xiv, 146 pages ~ 6.5 MB pdf)
Department:	Executive Committee for the Interdisciplinary Program in Transportation
Degree:	Doctor of Philosophy
Program:	Transportation
Document Type:	Dissertation
Advisory Committee:	Bernstein, David H. (Committee co-chair) Spasovic, Lazar (Committee co-chair) Pignataro, Louis J. (Committee member) Mouskos, Kyriacos (Committee member) Tavantzis, John (Committee member) Chien, I-Jy Steven (Committee member)
Date:	1999-05
Keywords:	Traffic congestion. Toll roads.
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	Congestion pricing has been regarded as an efficient method to reduce network-wide travel cost. In this dissertation, a methodology for toll design is developed to provide policy-makers with suggestions on both where to charge tolls and how much the tolls should be. As opposed to the traditional approach of marginal social cost pricing, this methodology is capable of dealing with the more realistic case, in which only a small number of links can be tolled. Furthermore, this methodology is expanded to accommodate multiple user groups. The toll design problem can be formulated using both deterministic and stochastic route choice models. The most natural formulation of this problem in both cases is a bilevel formulation. Such formulations are very difficult to solve because of the nonconvexity and nondifferentiability of the constraint set. In this dissertation, the problem is converted into a single level, standard nonlinear optimization problem by making certain simplifying assumption. This single-level version of the toll design problem can be solved using a variety of well-developed algorithms. Tests show that this approach can be used to generate reasonable results and provide valuable decision support to policy-makers.