Convergence of day-to-day traffic flow dynamics under tradable bottleneck permits

Abstract

This paper on traffic flow and bottle neck permits is from the proceedings of 14th international Conference on Urban Transport and the Environment in the 21st Century, which was held in Malta in 2008. The authors describe “tradable bottleneck permits” as a new transportation demand management scheme and discuss how they could be used to improve the efficiency for a general traffic network. The goal is to achieve a socially optimal state in which the total transportation cost is minimized by the decentralized behavior of agents. The authors discuss the microbehavior of the agents, the tatonnement process used for trading markets for the permits, the day-to-day dynamics of aggregated traffic flows and permit prices, and the macrodynamics by which the mean dynamics of the aggregated variables (flows and permit prices) converge to a socially optimal state. For the agents' behavior, the study used the best response model that is popular in evolutionary game theory.