CONGESTION PRICING FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN PASSENGER & FREIGHT MOBILITY
Team: Peiyu Jing, Takanori Sakai, Andre Romano Alho, Ali Shamshiripour, Antonis F. Lentzakis, Ravi Seshadri, Moshe Ben-Akiva
Develop an agent-based simulation framework to model congestion pricing effects, both from the demand and the supply side and on the passenger and the freight movements
Integrate this framework within the SimMobility agent-based urban simulation platform
Assess congestion pricing impacts on the transportation system across prototypical cities
Develop an agent-based simulation framework to model congestion pricing effects, both from the demand and the supply side and on the passenger and the freight movements
Integrate this framework within the SimMobility agent-based urban simulation platform
Assess congestion pricing impacts on the transportation system across prototypical cities
Network control strategies such as congestion pricing have been used in a number of metropolitan areas around the world for traffic congestion mitigation. Recent advances in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technology have led to increasing interest in distance- or usage-based road pricing as an effective alternative to traditional facility-, cordon- and area-based pricing. Facility-based and cordon/area-based pricing typically depend on physical infrastructure such as gates or gantries to detect when drivers enter or leave the tolled area. Unfortunately, if there is a need to effect changes in the charging facilities/areas or zones, physical gantries are not so easily relocated. Moreover, toll charges are not differentiated based on distance travelled within the tolling zone leading to inefficiency in terms of congestion management. An example of the use of GNSS technology in the context of distance-based pricing is the satellite-based next generation Electronic Road Pricing system in Singapore or ERP 2.0, set to be rolled out in 2022, which provides the ability to charge tolls based on distance traveled or time spent on the network.
The primary objective of the proposed research topic is to assess the systemic impacts of future urban mobility pricing schemes, and to recommend typology-specific optimal pricing strategies for both passenger and freight outcomes. These assessments will be facilitated via high-fidelity large-scale simulations on prototype cities that represent distinct urban typologies.
The project pursues the following goals:
Extend the existing simulation models of several prototype cities, available in SimMobility agent-based urban simulation platform, to model intra-urban freight-specific decisions and movements.
Define congestion pricing policies of interest (distance-/cordon-based, etc.) and investigate the impacts of the pricing strategies on both passenger and freight movements using the integrated passenger-freight model.
Publications:
Adnan, M., Pereira, F. C., Azevedo, C. L., Basak, K., Lovric, M., Raveau, S., Zhu, Y., Ferreira, J., Zegras, C. and Ben-Akiva, M. E. (2016) SimMobility: A Multi-scale Integrated Agent-Based Simulation. In 95th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board Forthcoming in Transportation Research Record.
Alho, A., Bhavathrathan, B. K., Stinson, M., Raja, G., Le, D.-T., Ben-Akiva, M. (2017) A multi-scale agent-based modelling framework for urban freight distribution. Transportation Research Procedia 27, pp. 188–196.
Oke, J. B., Akkinepally, A., Aboutaleb, Y., Chen, S., Xie, Y., Azevedo, C. L., Zegras, C., Ferreira, J., & Ben-Akiva, M. (2019). Assessing the impacts of future urban mobility via agent-based simulation of urban typologies (In preparation).
Lentzakis, A.F., Seshadri, R., Akkinepally, A., Vu, V. & Ben-Akiva, M. (2020), Hierarchical density-based clustering methods for tolling zone definition and their impact on distance-based toll optimization. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies Vol 118, p. 102685.