Topic：Optimal Route Location and Distance-Based Toll for A Build-Operate-Transfer Highway with Multi-type Vehicles
Date：20th,Sept,2016 9:00 A.M.
Location：A326 Anzhong Building
Reporter：Qiang Meng, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, National University of Singapore, Professor
Abstract：
Private provision of the highways through the build-operate-transfer (BOT) scheme has become one of the effective ways to expand the city-to-city transportation networks in many countries. This study deals with the practical planning problem regarding how to determine the route location and toll charges of multi-type vehicles for a new BOT highway in a city-to-city transportation network. A nice formulation based on the binary decision variables is presented to express a feasible BOT rout by making use of the Miller-Trucker-Zemlin (MTZ) technique proposed for the travelling salesman problem. Besides, a uniform distance-based toll charge scheme is selected on this BOT route with multi-type vehicles by assuming that the unit toll charges take the discrete values.
Based on the above problem settings, a bi-level programming model is developed for the proposed problem, where the upper-level model aims to maximize the network social welfare with the project profit constraints while the lower-level model is a conventional multiple-vehicle-type user equilibrium (MUE) problem. A tailed Branch and Cut (BC) relaxation based algorithm are designed for solving the bi-level programming model. In this algorithm, the bi-level programming model is firstly relaxed to a single objective convex programing model by utilizing the tightest convex lower bound of for the bilinear functions, and it is further related to a mixed integer linear programming model. It can be demonstrated that the global optimal solution of the bi-level programming model is guaranteed when the lower bound of the network social welfare of the unexplored solution is not less than the network social welfare of a known MUE solution. Finally, two numerical examples are conducted to assess the efficiency of the models and algorithm proposed by this study.
About the speaker：
Dr. Qiang Meng is currently a Full Professor in Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at National University of Singapore (NUS), Co-director of NUS-LTA Transportation Research Centre and an urban mobility panel number of National Science Foundation under the Prime Minister’s Office of Singapore.
Dr. Meng received his PhD from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2000. His research focuses include transportation network modeling and optimization, shipping and intermodal freight transportation network analysis, and quantitative risk assessment of transport operations. He has published more than 139 SCI indexed articles on the leading transportation and logistics journals, with the SCI index rate of 27. Some of his studies have been successfully used by the transportation and maritime industries, including QRAFT – a software package for the quantitative risk assessment of urban road tunnels. He is an Associate Editor of Transportation Research Part B, Journal of Transportation Engineering (ASCE) and Transportation Research Part E. He has clinched a number of awards and prizes, including Outstanding Alumni Award of Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2016, Dean’s Chair Professor in Faculty of Engineering at NUS in 2015, the 13th World Conference on Transportation Research (WCTR) Society Prize for the best paper (2013), Best Paper Award for Methodological Development in the 9th EASTS (East Asia Society for Transportation Studies) International Conference (2011), Best Paper Award of AHB40 - Highway Capacity and Quality of Service Committee - in the 90th TRB Annual Meeting (2011) and Singapore MOT (Ministry of Transportation) Minister’s Innovation Award 2009.