美国数学建模竞赛特等奖论文——mcm 2005 judge b【数学建模】.pdfVIP

Judges Commentary 391 Judges Commentary: The Outstanding Tollbooths Papers Kelly Black Dept. of Mathematics Union College Schenectady, NY 12308 blackk@union. edu Overview of the Problem The teams were asked to examine the flow oftraffic through a toll plaza. One ofthe difficulties in this problem is that the traffic flow through a toll plaza is not actively managed; rather, the traffic through the system is passively managed by the careful design of the roadway and the toll-collection system. On most roadways, a toll plaza consists of a long transition to an increased number of lanes, the collection system (the tollbooths), and a long transition back to the original number of lanes. Interestingly, only a very small number of entries suggested adding an active management component to the toll plaza, such as ways to restrict the way that drivers can change lanes. In the last paragraph of the problem statement three tasks/questions were given: *Make amodelto help determine the optimal number oftollbooths to deploy in a barrier-toll plaza. *Explicitly consider the scenario where there is exactly one tollbooth per incoming lane. *Under what conditions is this more or less effective than the current prac- tice? At first glance, it would seem that the considerable power of queueing the- ory would be readily available for this problem. Unfortunately, this is only true to a certain extent. The nature of a toll plaza is that multiple lanes expand into even more lanes into which people can change if they feel it is advantageous. Once again, people get in the way of good mathematics. The UMAPJournal26(3)(2005) 391-399. eCopyright 2005 by COMAPInc. All rights reserved. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without f