美国数学建模竞赛特等奖论文——2005 B O Two Tools for Tollbooth Optimization【数学建模】.pdfVIP

Two Toolsfor Tollbooth Optimization 227 Two Tools for Tollbooth Optimization Ephrat Bitton Anand Kulkarni Mark Shlimovich University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA Advisor: L. Craig Evans Summary We determine the optimal number of lanes in a toll plaza to maximize the transit rate of vehicles through the system. We use two different approaches, one macroscopic and one discrete, to model traffic through the toll plaza. In our first approach, we derive results about flows through a sequence of bottlenecks and demonstrate that maximum flow occurs when the flow rate through all bottlenecks is equal. We apply these results to the toll-plaza system to determine the optimal number of toll lanes. At high densities, the optimal number of tollbooths exhibits alinear relationship with the number oftoll lanes. We then construct a discrete traffic simulation based on stochastic cellular automata, a microscopic approach to traffic modeling, which we use to validate the optimality of our model. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the simulation generates flow rates very close to those of toll plazas on the Garden State Park- way in New Jersey, which further confirms the accuracy of our predictions. Having the number of toll lanes equal the number of highway lanes is optimal only when a highway has consistently low density and is suboptimal otherwise. For medium- to high-density traffic, the optimal number of toll lanes is three to four times the number of highway lanes. Both models demonstrate that if a tollway has lanes in excess of the optimal, flow will not increase or abate. Finally, we examine how well our models can be generalized and comment on their applicability to the real world. [EDITORS NOTE: This Outstanding paper won the Ben Fusaro Award for the Tollbooths Problem. The text of the paper