Robust toll pricing: A novel approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a non-adversarial robust toll pricing method that accounts for asymmetric information between toll setters and users, leading to less conservative and more practical pricing strategies.

Contribution

It develops a novel non-adversarial distributionally robust optimization framework for toll pricing, with algorithms for both simple and complex network structures.

Findings

Less conservative pricing compared to adversarial models

Effective algorithms for single and multi-network scenarios

Validated approach using real-world Chicago traffic data

Abstract

We study a robust toll pricing problem where toll setters and users have different level of information when taking their decisions. Toll setters do not have full information on the costs of the network and rely on historical information when determining toll rates, whereas users decide on the path to use from origin to destination knowing toll rates and having, in addition, more accurate traffic data. Toll setters often also face constraints on price experimentation which means less opportunity for price revision. Motivated by this we propose a novel robust pricing methodology for fixing prices where we take non-adversarial view of nature different from the existing robust approaches. We show that our non-adversarial robustness results in less conservative pricing decisions compared to traditional adversarial nature setting. We start by first considering a single origin-destination parallel network in this new robust setting and formulate the robust toll pricing problem as a distributionally robust optimization problem, for which we develop an exact algorithm based on a mixed-integer programming formulation and a heuristic based on two-point support distribution. We further extend our formulations to more general networks and show how our algorithms can be adapted for the general networks. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of our approach by means of numerical experiments both on randomly generated networks and on the data recorded on the road network of the city of Chicago.