Pricing Toll Roads under Uncertainty

We study the toll pricing problem when the non-toll costs on the network are not fixed and can vary over time. We assume that users who take their decisions, after the tolls are fixed, have full information of all costs before making their decision. Toll-setter, on the other hand, do not have any information of the future costs on the network. The only information toll-setter have is historical information (sample) of the network costs. In this work we study this problem on parallel networks and networks with few number of paths in single origin-destination setting. We formulate toll-setting problem in this setting as a distributionally robust optimization problem and propose a method to solve to it. We illustrate the usefulness of our approach by doing numerical experiments using a parallel network.

[1]  Levent Tunçel,et al.  Efficient heuristic algorithms for maximum utility product pricing problems , 2016, Comput. Oper. Res..

[2]  Martine Labbé,et al.  A parallel between two classes of pricing problems in transportation and marketing , 2010 .

[3]  Patrice Marcotte,et al.  Two-stage stochastic bilevel programming over a transportation network , 2013 .

[4]  Stan P. M. van Hoesel,et al.  Tariff Optimization in Networks , 2007, INFORMS J. Comput..

[5]  George Karakostas,et al.  Edge pricing of multicommodity networks for heterogeneous selfish users , 2004, 45th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science.

[6]  R. Rockafellar,et al.  Optimization of conditional value-at risk , 2000 .

[7]  Masao Fukushima,et al.  Worst-Case Conditional Value-at-Risk with Application to Robust Portfolio Management , 2009, Oper. Res..

[8]  Michel Minoux,et al.  Joint optimization of pricing and resource allocation in competitive telecommunications networks , 2007 .

[9]  Patrice Marcotte,et al.  A Bilevel Modeling Approach to Pricing and Fare Optimization in the Airline Industry , 2002 .

[10]  Martine Labbé Bilevel Programming and Price Setting Problems , 2006, OR.

[11]  S. Travis Waller,et al.  Solution Methods for Robust Pricing of Transportation Networks under Uncertain Demand , 2010 .

[12]  P. Marcotte,et al.  A bilevel model of taxation and its application to optimal highway pricing , 1996 .

[13]  Stan P. M. van Hoesel,et al.  An overview of Stackelberg pricing in networks , 2008, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[14]  Melvyn Sim,et al.  Distributionally Robust Optimization and Its Tractable Approximations , 2010, Oper. Res..

[15]  Alessia Violin,et al.  Mathematical programming approaches to pricing problems , 2015, 4OR.

[16]  Patrice Marcotte,et al.  A Numerical Study of the Logit Network Pricing Problem , 2015, Transp. Sci..

[17]  R. Ravi,et al.  An FPTAS for minimizing a class of low-rank quasi-concave functions over a convex set , 2013, Oper. Res. Lett..

[18]  Christine Ann Brown,et al.  Financing Transport Infrastructure: For Whom the Road Tolls , 2005 .

[19]  Changhyun Kwon,et al.  Worst-Case Conditional Value-at-Risk Minimization for Hazardous Materials Transportation , 2016, Transp. Sci..