Some feasibility studies for current toll road projects require the ability to model distance-based tolls, which is the way that some toll road operators establish the fees for usage in order to predict expected flow patterns and toll revenues. In practice, different variants of distance-based tolls are experimented with, such as capped maximum toll, minimum toll and different fees per entry ramp. In static multi-class assignment problems, all these toll variants can be modelled by a method referred to as “ramp-to-ramp tolls”, with the condition that there are no alternative tolled roads between an entry-exit ramp pair. Also, the ramp-to-ramp method requires the user of the software to prepare the toll value for all the possible combinations of entry/exit ramps ahead of time. In order to overcome these limitations a new algorithm for distance-based toll modelling was developed which directly uses the toll cost per link instead of the cost of entry-exit ramp pairs. Similar to the ramp-to-ramp method, the algorithm is based on the construction of temporary links, which span the toll road with the significant difference that the original links are kept as well and are used during the equilibration process. In order to solve the static traffic assignment problem on this augmented network a parallel version of the bi-conjugate linear approximation method has been adapted for the particular toll structure considered. The new method is illustrated with an example of capped distance-based toll modelling on a real-world network, along with other results.
Michael Florian教授是国际著名的交通系统专家，曾担任加拿大、美国、欧洲以及部分亚洲国家的80多个交通系统规划组织的顾问，参加了世界范围的数十个交通咨询项目。他在路网优化和交通规划模型等相关领域已经发表论文150余篇，撰写了5本专著，担任了包括Operations Research、Transportation Science、Regional Science and Network Economics和Transportation Research在内的多个学术期刊的副主编及交通系列丛书的主编。他1990年当选为加拿大皇家院士，1998年获得INFORMS交通科学部“R.D.终身成就奖”，2005年获得了加拿大计算机开创者的IBM奖。他1969年取得哥伦比亚大学工程学博士学位，现为蒙特利尔大学计算机科学和运筹学名誉教授并担任INRO Consultants（主持开发著名的EMME/2，Emme 3，Stan与Dynameq）总裁。包括中国在内的许多的大城市都在使用他的研究成果。