3 - Highway Space Inventory Control System

Abstract

A new demand management concept, Highway Space Inventory Control System (HSICS) is proposed and modeled in this paper. The basic idea of the HSICS is that all road users have to make advance reservations to travel on the highway. Such a reservation system is flexible and could be applied during peak hours throughout the highway or only on highly congested sections of highways, or through out the day on highways depending on the requirements and considerations of road users, policy makers, and other relevant stakeholders. The proposed HSICS model consists of two models, Highway Allocation System (HAS) and the Highway Reservation System (HRS). HAS is an offline module that allocates the highway sections to various vehicle types (single occupant cars, carpools, public transit, trucks) during different time periods with the goal of optimizing the objective function(s) value(s) subjects to the existing supply and demand constraints. It develops the optimal highway allocations for different traffic “scenarios”. The “traffic scenarios - optimal allocation” data collected in this way enables the development of HRS. HRS is the on-line system that makes on-line decisions regarding the possibility to accept driver requests. The proposed model is illustrated using a numerical example of a highway section. The optimal allocation is obtained offline for a particular arrival pattern (the solution from the integer programming) and the performance of the proposed neural network can be checked against the optimal allocation.