Sequential experimental approach for congestion pricing with multiple vehicle types and multiple time periods

In this paper, a sequential experimental approach is proposed for searching an optimal congestion pricing with multiple vehicle types and multiple time periods. The method explicitly considers the interaction among different types of vehicular flows as well as the interdependence of travel demands among various origindestination (O-D) pairs and in different time periods in estimating the optimal link tolls. Considering that the demand functions are not easily available in practice, the developed iterative experimental pricing strategy updates link tolls from only observed link flows without requiring the explicit forms of demand functions. The detailed procedure of implementation is presented and examined with the numerical experiments. © 2009 IEEE