Effects of second-best tradable credit scheme on transportation network for travel mobility management

The second-best tradable credit scheme is studied to analyse its effects on travel mobility by a bilevel programming model. The transport authority optimises the credit charging scheme to minimise the total system travel time and travellers choose paths to minimise their generalised travel costs. A genetic algorithm with some improvements on the selection operator is used to solve the proposed bilevel programming model. In numerical experiments, we discuss the implications of travellers' path choice behaviour and traffic flow distribution under the second-best tradable credit scheme with different combinations of credit-charging links. The results show that the credit charging scheme with all links is obviously better than other schemes in the total system travel time. Besides, the credit charging scheme using congested links or duplicate links of the maximum traffic flow path as credit-charging links is effective in reducing traffic flow on congested links and mitigating the congestion of the whole transportation network.