Research On Method For Deciding Freeway Toll Standard

Freeway construction in China was initiated in the late 1980s, but up to now freeway toll standard, is mainly decided by subjective experience and lack of science basis. As we know, only toll standard is properly designed, the highway could attract more and more consumers with its rapidness, convenience and high quality of service. In that way, the resource of highway all over the country could be used sufficiently and be worthy of its investments. How to set a reasonable and equitable freeway toll standard with the domestic reality and the overseas'experience, is an important work now.Not only the interior and exterior factors what would influence the freeway toll standard are considered, but also the basic economic principle, value of time theory and transportation behavior theory are taken into account when we described the freeway toll standard deciding process.The characteristics of bi-level programming model are presented at first, with the characteristic comparison of the algorithms which to solve those models. Then the conclusion is given out that bi-level programming is more suitable for the problem of freeway toll standard's deciding method.This paper studies the present defects in the methods to determine the freeway toll standard, and from the point of the road users, sets up bi-level programming model based on value of time analysis and proposes the heuristic solution algorithm. Not only the benefits of freeway investors, administers and the customers are taken into account in this model, but also the limitation, that only consider one section of highway and ignore the relationship of several sections'traffic flow when we put up toll research, is overcome. At the same time, a simplified heuristic algorithm which can get approximate results is designed which need not to calculate derivative. The algorithm makes up for the limitation of sensitivity analysis method that is usually used for solving bi-level programming problem.At last, in order to evaluate freeway toll standard more accurately and show the highway's general benefit under different toll cases more directly, we introduce the"simulate"concept and establish the highway operation simulation system. This paper contains the description of the whole frame of this system. On the basis of system's programming, we complete the solution and analysis module for bi-level programming model. Finally, an actual example is given to show the validity of the model and algorithm by applying this module.