A Dynamic Road Pricing Model for Freeway Electronic Toll Collection Systems under Build–Operate–Transfer Arrangements

Abstract

In this article, a discrete non-linear mathematical programming model with a variational inequality constraint is proposed to determine road tolls and time-varying congestion tolls for a freeway electronic toll collection system under a build–operate–transfer arrangement. An interdependent relationship between the profits of private investors and the temporal and spatial distributions of traffic demand is integrated into the proposed dynamic road-pricing model. Assuring the maximization of social welfare as a working assumption, an optimal toll scheme is determined by maximizing private investors’ profits. A modified Nelder–Mead simplex algorithm integrated with the nested diagonalization method is elaborated to solve this dynamic road pricing problem. Numerical results are given to demonstrate its validity.