Using emission functions in modeling environmentally sustainable traffic assignment policies

Abstract

Transport systems play a crucial role for sustainable development, and hence, sustainable urban transportation has recently become a major research area. Most of the existing studies propose evaluation methods that use simulation tools to assess the sustainability of different transportation policies. Although there are some recent studies, considering the sustainability dimension and the resulting policies through mathematical programming models is still an open research area. In this study, we focus on controlling the gas emissions for the environmental sustainability and propose several mathematical programming models that incorporate the measurements of gas emissions over a traffic network. The proposed models both reflect the route choice decisions of the network users and the decisions of the transportation managers that aim at making the transport systems more sustainable. We define the emission functions in terms of the traffic flow so that the accumulated emission amounts can be modeled accurately, particularly in case of congestion. Using the proposed emission functions, we introduce alternate objective functions into our optimization models and incorporate several policies which are based on the well-known toll pricing and capacity enhancement. We conduct a computational study on a well-known testing network and present numerical results to evaluate the proposed alternate models.

Available Versions of this Item

• Using emission functions in modeling environmentally sustainable traffic assignment policies. (deposited 15 Nov 2011 16:32) [Currently Displayed]
  • Using emission functions in modeling environmentally sustainable traffic assignment policies. (deposited 10 Oct 2012 21:22)