Departure time, route choice and congestion toll in a queuing network with elastic demand

This paper deals with the modeling of peak-period congestion and optimal pricing in a queuing network with elastic demand. The approach employed in our study is a combined application of the space–time expanded network (STEN) representation of time-varying traffic flow and the conventional network equilibrium modeling techniques. Given the elastic demand function for trips between each origin–destination pair and the schedule delay cost associated with each destination, the departure time and route choice of commuters and the optimal variable tolls of bottlenecks will be determined jointly by solving a system optimization problem over the STEN. Our STEN approach can deal with general queuing network with elastic demand, and allow for treatment of commuter heterogeneity in their work start time and schedule delay cost, and hence make a significant advance over the previous simple bottleneck models of peak-period congestion.