Research on mixed strategy for traffic congestion control under user heterogeneity

With the increase in travel demand and car ownership, traffic congestion is becoming more and more serious. To alleviate traffic congestion, based on the user heterogeneity, this paper proposes to implement both toll and tradable credit scheme for the public-private partnership transportation network, i. e., tolling and charging tradable credits for the users who use the government-built public roads and BOT private roads, respectively. Based on the travelers' routing behavior under this mixed strategy, we build the variational inequality model of user equilibrium and market equilibrium. Then, according to the system optimal model, the mixed strategy set can be obtained that promotes the user equilibrium flow pattern to the system optimal flow pattern, and the upper bound of system efficiency loss under mixed strategy is also derived. Furthermore, we propose two bi-level programming models covering other objectives and obtain the optimal mixed strategy. Finally, a numerical experiment on a specific road network is conducted, which can obtain the specific amount of tradable credits and charging value for each public road and BOT private road respectively, and the total number of windows for that need to be set in the road network. © 2019, Editorial Board of Journal of Systems Engineering Society of China. All right reserved.