Optimal Pricing in a Range of Urban Road Network (Case Study: Isfahan City)

Existing congestion in the urban transport network involves many costs such as air pollution, delays for passengers, and increased fuel consumption. Internalizing congestion externality cost is a basis for transportation congestion pricing. This policy is implemented in many metropolitans worldwide. One of the methods used in network pricing is the use of a belt pricing. This pricing is made up of a number of arcs that surround the crowded city and passengers who are going to cross these arcs and enter this area are required to pay a fee. The most important issue in this pricing method is to determine the amount of toll imposed on these arcs. The purpose of this research is to determine optimal congestion toll in a particular cordon-based network in which user benefits are maximized. In this study, in order to find the optimal amount of toll, a combinatorial bi-level optimization problem is introduced, in such a way that net social surplus is maximized at the upper level, and user equilibrium problem with elastic demand is solved at the lower level, then genetic algorithm in the MATLAB software is used to solve this model. The results show a toll of 13 thousand Rials for entrance to cordon per hour in 2016, would increase the network user benefits by 41 percent.