Optimal coordinated congestion pricing for multiple regions: a surrogate-based approach

Congestion pricing is one of the efficient travel demand management strategies. Many existing researches focus on dealing with the toll optimization problem for a single area. However, the urban network is often composed of several administrative regions. Furthermore, even inside a single administrative region, there may be multiple subnetworks with different traffic dynamics. As a result, the centric pricing scheme may not be applicable. This paper aims to design a coordinated dynamic pricing scheme for such a scenario with multiple adjacent areas which experience an overlapping congested period. Unlike the traditional approach centered on the bi-level mathematical programming, we adopt the regressing Kriging model to estimate the input–output mapping, thus searching for the simulation-based optimal solution in the toll design problem. Two types of coordinated pricing schemes are proposed. The first or unconstrained scheme only focuses on the network performance, while the second or constrained scheme further takes into account the pricing efficiency. The proposed coordinated pricing scheme is further compared with the perimeter control. The results indicate that our scheme is more moderate without imposing traffic burden on the links/corridors heading to protected zones.