A Bilevel Programming Framework for Determining the Optimal Incentive-Based Traffic Demand Management Strategy

Incentive-based traffic demand management (IBTDM) is a cost-effective alternative to increasing capacities and conventional traffic demand management strategies. This paper focuses on IBTDM strategy to provide incentives for commuting drivers’ departure time shifts to balance temporal distribution of demand by proposing a bilevel programming framework to obtain optimal IBTDM strategy and to evaluate IBTDM strategy’s impact on commuters’ departure time choice behavior. In the upper-level, the objective function is to minimize total travel time with the total monetary compensation constraint by a pre-set budget, while decision variables are time-varying incentives for commuters according to their departure times. The optimal time-varying incentive profile is then passed on to the lower-level, within which the decision variable is personal departure time choice. The result indicates that such a time-varying linear incentive profile that reaches the highest at the “shoulders” of peak period while remains lowest during the most peak period achieves superior performance.