Reliability-based marginal cost pricing problem case with both demand uncertainty and travelers' perception errors

Abstract

Focusing on the first-best marginal cost pricing (MCP) in a stochastic network with both travel demand uncertainty and stochastic perception errors within the travelers' route choice decision processes, this paper develops a perceived risk-based stochastic network marginal cost pricing (PRSN-MCP) model. Numerical examples based on an integrated method combining the moment analysis approach, the fitting distribution method, and the reliability measures are also provided to demonstrate the importance and properties of the proposed model. The main finding is that ignoring the effect of travel time reliability and travelers' perception errors may significantly reduce the performance of the first-best MCP tolls, especially under high travelers' confidence and network congestion levels. The analysis result could also enhance our understanding of (1) the effect of stochastic perception error (SPE) on the perceived travel time distribution and the components of road toll; (2) the effect of road toll on the actual travel time distribution and its reliability measures; (3) the effect of road toll on the total network travel time distribution and its statistics; and (4) the effect of travel demand level and the value of reliability (VoR) level on the components of road toll. © 2013 Shaopeng Zhong et al.