Highway Reservation Strategy: Analytical Modeling Approach

Inspired by the success of reservation systems in airlines industries, and the Connected Vehicle technology supporting vehicular communications, this paper investigated a highway reservation and developed a mathematical optimization formulation to solve the optimal trip scheduling plan for a traffic network. The performance was quantified by total monetary cost of travel time and applicable early arrival time or late arrival time. In the two numerical case studies with an assumption of 100% compliance of the users to the reservation system's scheduling, the system cost was 24.1% and 21.7% lower than those of the two corresponding user equilibrium solutions. The reservation system effectively redistributed the peak hour demand to the non-peak hours by limiting the reservation maximum flow rate of the reservation links.