This study investigates the potential of link- and path-based incentives to mitigate congestion in urban transportation networks under a budget constraint. Both incentive schemes are formulated as non-linear optimisation problems with complementarity constraints. Mathematically, it is demonstrated that the feasible region of the link-based model is a subset of the feasible region of the path-based model under the same budget constraint. Consequently, path-based incentives exhibit greater potential to shift the user equilibrium flow pattern toward the system optimum compared to link incentives. A column generation-based iterative solution technique, which generates new paths at each iteration, is devised to efficiently solve both optimisation problems. Numerical experiments conducted for various transport networks also highlight the efficiency and scalability of the proposed algorithm, and the superiority of path-based incentives in reducing total travel time in urban transportation networks.

This paper extends an existing linear quadratic model predictive control (LQMPC) approach to multi-destination traffic networks, where the correct origin-destination (OD) relations are preserved. In the literature, the LQMPC approach has been presented for efficient routing and intersection signal control. The optimization problem in the LQMPC has a linear quadratic formulation that can be solved quickly, which is beneficial for a real-time application. However, the existing LQMPC approach does not preserve OD relations and thus may send traffic to wrong destinations. This problem is tackled by a heuristic method presented is this paper. We present two macroscopic models: 1) a non-linear route-specific model which keeps track of traffic dynamics for each OD pair and 2) a linear model that aggregates all route traffic states, which can be embedded into the LQMPC framework. The route-specific model predicts traffic dynamics and provides information to the LQMPC before the optimization and evaluates the optimal solutions after the optimization. The information obtained from the route-specific model is formulated as constraints in the LQMPC to narrow the solution space and exclude unrealistic solutions that would lead to flows that are inconsistent with the OD relations. The extended LQMPC approach is tested in a synthetic network with multiple bottlenecks. The simulation of the LQMPC approach achieves a total time spent close to the system optimum, and the computation time remains tractable.

In this paper we develop a fast model predictive control (MPC) approach for variable speed limit coordination to resolve freeway jam waves. Existing MPC approaches that are based on the second-order traffic flow models suffer from high computation load due to the non-linear and non-convex optimization formulation. In recent years, simplified MPC approaches which are based on discrete first-order traffic flow models have attracted more and more attention because they are beneficial for real-time applications. In literature, the type of traffic jam resolved by these approaches is limited to the standing queue in which the jam head is fixed at the bottleneck. Another type of traffic jam known as the jam wave, has been neglected by the discrete first-order model-based MPC approaches. To fill this gap, we develop a fast MPC approach based on a more accurate discrete first-order model. The model keeps the linear property of the classical discrete first-order model, meanwhile takes traffic flow features of jam waves propagation into consideration. A classical non-linear MPC and a recently proposed linear MPC are compared with the proposed MPC in terms of computation speed and jam wave resolution by a benchmark problem. Simulation results show that the proposed MPC resolves the jam wave with a real-time feasible computation speed.