Tolls in Transportation Networks

Masterarbeit aus dem Jahr 2011 im Fachbereich Mathematik - Angewandte Mathematik, Technische Universität Berlin, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: The world-wide road traffic volume increases continuously while street capacities cannot be expanded accordingly. Coping with traffic congestion to reduce the overall travel time requires sophisticated traffic planning methods. Charge fees for the usage of network capacities is of special interest in scientific literature and, recently, has been implemented in practise. However, for technical, economical or political reasons, it is still not practicable to impose tolls on every edge of a given traffic network individually. Therefore, we study the mathematical optimization problem of computing tolls for a predefined subset of roads with the objective of reducing the total travel time. Furthermore, we discuss the related problem of computing tolls when only a finite number of taxable roads is accounted for. For both problems we present algorithms applicable on general large-scale traffic networks. We test their performance and solution quality systematically on real-world instances. Finally, the results are integrated into an agent-based transport simulator to achieve qualitatively better solutions and reduced convergence time of the simulation process.