A novel Dynamic Pricing Route Reservations architecture

Route reservations have been proposed as an effective solution to mitigate traffic congestion while preserving
the road network in free-flow traffic conditions, offering users some limited departure time and route choices. However, high user compliance is required. To provide users with the freedom to choose among any spatiotemporal route in the road network, in this work we propose a dynamic pricing route reservations
architecture. At each time step, the central controller sets prices dynamically, using the network’s reservations status and the users’ demand characteristics. Rational users will ultimately choose the route that minimizes their disutility by considering routes’ travel time, schedule delays, and reservation price. A series of microscopic simulations reveal that the proposed approach demonstrates a similar traffic performance as other optimal route reservation approaches. It however outperforms them in terms of social welfare, user satisfaction and flexibility, providing users with numerous spatiotemporal free-flow route choices, while minimizing aggregated disutility.