Optimum Location of Motorway Interchanges: Users’ Perspective

Repolho, Hugo M.; Church, Richard L.; Antunes, António Pais

doi:10.1061/(asce)te.1943-5436.0000162

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 30 publications

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“…Despite some efforts have been made to optimize the operation of motorway corridors, such as the ones by Danczyk, Liu (2011) and Repolho et al (2010Repolho et al ( , 2011 regarding the location of speed sensors and interchanges, respectively, little research has been conducted on the optimization of toll collection sites. The tool presented in this paper contributes to address this issue, particularly concerning the application of an emerging technology that is still not generalized among tolled motorways.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tolling Motorways in the Time of Economic Downturn: The Case of Portugal

Amorim¹,

Lobo²,

Couto³

2019

Transport

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The recent European debt crisis has led many governments to impose strict measures to alleviate public expenditure and increase revenue, especially in the southern countries. Many public services and infrastructures became more costly for users due to the increase of existing fees or the implementation of new ones. In Portugal, one of the measures adopted by the government consisted in the removal of shadow tolls and the application of the user-pays principle to the entire network of rural motorways. To rapidly implement, this measure, in the context of financial constraints, the Electronic Toll Collection (ETC), materialized by the installation of gantries in selected motorway segments, was the preferred solution over the more time and resource consuming construction of toll plazas. Toll revenue is directly collected by the state, which intends to cover, at least partially, the expenses associated with the contractual payments to private concessionaires for the traffic using these roads. The main objective of this research is to provide a new optimization tool to allocate toll gantries to the segments of an existing motorway with the aim of maximizing toll revenue, based on the case study of Portuguese motorways. A macroscopic decision model that predicts drivers’ decision on using a tolled segment or the fastest alternative route and an optimization model that sets the price and location of toll gantries along a given motorway work together to provide a valuable tool to maximize the revenue. A special focus has been placed on scenarios of economic downturn, characterized by a negative growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP); however, the new tool allows making explanatory analyses for situations of economic growth. The results show that the optimal configuration for ETC vary with the macroeconomic scenario, with the number of tolled segments and price per kilometre inducing relevant variations on the revenue and traffic volume. The proposed methodology may be applied in other countries to assist decision makers in the implementation of ETC in motorways under different conditions. The required data is easy to collect from sources at the disposal of the practitioners.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tolling Motorways in the Time of Economic Downturn: The Case of Portugal

Amorim¹,

Lobo²,

Couto³

2019

Transport

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A general approach for the location of transfer points on a network with a trip covering criterion and mixed distances

López-de-los-Mozos

Mesa

Schöbel³

2017

European Journal of Operational Research

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In this paper we consider a set of origin-destination pairs in a mixed model in which a network embedded in the plane represents an alternative high-speed transportation system, and study a trip covering problem which consists on locating two points in the network which maximize the number of covered pairs, that is, the number of pairs which use the network by acceding and exiting through such points. To deal with the absence of convexity of this mixed distance function we propose a decomposition method based on formulating a collection of subproblems and solving each of them via discretization of the solution set.The case of locating only one facility regarding transfer facilities already located in the network is a particular case of that dealt with in this paper and can be categorized as a conditional location problem. Thus, adding the extra demand captured by both pairs consisting of a new facility and an already located one, and those consisting of two new facilities, the global contribution of the two new transfer points is computed.The paper is organized as follows. After this introduction the problem is formulated in Section 2. The necessary definitions and results on the distance on networks are summarized in Section 3. Section 4 is devoted to solve the two cases arisen from the properties of the distance. The paper ends with some conclusions and further research. The problemHereinafter we will use the notation introduced by [5]. Let A = {A i = (a i , b i ), i = 1, . . . , n} ⊂ IR 2 be a set of existing facilities on the plane. We assume that travel time distances between two points in the plane can be estimated by the Euclidean metric.Let T = (t ij ) ∈ IR n×n be an origin-destination (O/D) matrix in which trip patterns are codified, i.e., t ij is the weight of the ordered pair (A i , A j ) (or (i, j), if there is no confusion). This matrix is known a priori: for example, in a transportation context each t ij can be viewed as the number of trips from an origin A i to a destination A j , and in a telecommunication setting it could represent the amount of data transfered from server i to server j.In order to formulate the problem with a mixed mode of transportation, we consider an embedded network N (V, E) representing a high-speed system, with |V | vertices and |E| edges. Each vertex v ∈ V represents a junction or a node, and we assume that each undirected edge e ∈ E has a length l e and it can be modeled as a straight-line segment. The embedding of N in the Euclidean plane as well as the coordinates of the nodes in N will allow us to compute the travel distances between each pair of points. Let N be the continuum set of points on the edges. The edge lengths induce a distance function d on N , such that for any two points x, y ∈ N , d(x, y) is the length of any shortest path connecting x and y. Moreover, if x and y are on the same edge, d(x, y) = ||x − y||.For any two points x, y ∈ N , let us define the high-speed distance d N (x, y) = αd(x, y), with α ∈ (0, 1). Parameter α is a speed factor. It is straig...

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