published journal article

A Control Theoretic Approach to Simultaneously Estimate Average Value of Time and Determine Dynamic Price for High-Occupancy Toll Lanes

Publication Date

July 20, 2020

Author(s)

Areas of Expertise

Infrastructure Delivery, Operations, & Resilience Transportation Economics, Funding, & Finance

Abstract

The dynamic pricing problem of a freeway corridor with high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes was formulated and solved based on a point queue abstraction of the traffic system. However, existing pricing strategies cannot guarantee that the closed-loop system converges to the optimal state, in which the HOT lanes’ capacity is fully utilized but there is no queue on the HOT lanes, and a well-behaved estimation and control method is quite challenging and still elusive.

This article attempts to fill the gap by making three fundamental contributions: (i) to present a simpler formulation of the point queue model based on the new concept of residual capacity, (ii) to propose a simple feedback control theoretic approach to estimate the average value of time and calculate the dynamic price, and (iii) to analytically and numerically prove that the closed-loop system is stable and guaranteed to converge to the optimal state, in either Gaussian or exponential manners.