OPTIMAL ROAD PRICING UNDER STOCHASTIC USER EQUILIBRIUM.

Abstract

This paper discusses the optimal road pricing, which minimizes the total travel time, under Stochastic User Equilibrium (SUE) in the general transportation network. We analyse the structure of the problem formulated as a bilevel programming, using the conception of duality. As the result, we learn that the system optimum flow pattern can be attained in an arbitrary network by setting an appropriate toll pattern and the general solution has a form extending the conventional marginal cost pricing to the stochastic user behavior. Moreover, the uniqueness of the optimum link toll is proved in the case of logit-based SUE.