Efficient Simulation-Based Toll Optimization for Large-Scale Networks

Carolina Osorio*, Bilge Atasoy

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)
9 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This paper proposes a simulation-based optimization technique for high-dimensional toll optimization problems of large-scale road networks. We formulate a novel analytical network model. The latter is embedded within a metamodel simulation-based optimization (SO) algorithm. It provides analytical and differentiable structural information of the underlying problem to the SO algorithm. Hence, the algorithm no longer treats the simulator as a black box. The analytical model is formulated as a system of nonlinear equations that can be efficiently evaluated with standard solvers. The dimension of the system of equations scales linearly with network size. It scales independently of the dimension of the route choice set and of link attributes such as link length. Hence, it is a scalable formulation suitable for the optimization of large-scale networks. For instance, the model is used in the case study of the paper for toll optimization of a Singapore network with more than 4,050 OD (origin-destination) pairs and 18,200 feasible routes. The corresponding analytical model is implemented as a system of 860 nonlinear equations. The analytical network model is validated based on one-dimensional toy network problems. It captures the main trends of the simulation-based objective function and, more importantly, accurately locates the global optimum for all experiments. The proposed SO approach is then used to optimize a set of 16 tolls for the network of expressways and major arterials of Singapore. The proposed method is compared with a general-purpose algorithm. The proposed method identifies good quality solutions at the very first iteration. The benchmark method identifies solutions with similar performance after 2 days of computation or similarly after more than 30 points have been simulated. The case study indicates that the analytical structural information provided to the algorithm by the analytical network model enables it to (i) identify good quality solutions fast and (ii) become robust to both the quality of the initial points and to the stochasticity of the simulator. The final solutions identified by the proposed algorithm outperform those of the benchmark method by an average of 18%.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1010-1024
JournalTransportation Science
Volume55
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care
Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Congestion pricing
  • Simulation-based optimization
  • Toll optimization

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