A trial-and-error method with autonomous vehicle-to-infrastructure traffic counts for cordon-based congestion pricing

Abstract

This study proposes a practical trial-and-error method to solve the optimal toll design problem of cordon-based pricing, where only the traffic counts autonomously collected on the entry links of the pricing cordon are needed. With the fast development and adoption of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) facilities, it is very convenient to autonomously collect these data. Two practical properties of the cordon-based pricing are further considered in this article: the toll charge on each entry of one pricing cordon is identical; the total inbound flow to one cordon should be restricted in order to maintain the traffic conditions within the cordon area. Then, the stochastic user equilibrium (SUE) with asymmetric link travel time functions is used to assess each feasible toll pattern. Based on a variational inequality (VI) model for the optimal toll pattern, this study proposes a theoretically convergent trial-and-error method for the addressed problem, where only traffic counts data are needed. Finally, the proposed method is verified based on a numerical network example.