Highway Reservation System: Models, Simulations, and Implementation Discussions

Learning from the success of reservation systems in industries including airlines and hotel, a highway reservation concept has been considered by transportation engineers. In the reservation system, people are not allowed to access the highways whenever and wherever they want, instead they need to reserve a spot in advance to use some highway segments within a certain amount of time. This dissertation includes a feasibility study of the highway reservation system and its findings, the evaluation of benefits, the implementation challenges, the supporting technology, and a consideration of time of value and social equity issues. The dissertation contains four papers about different aspects of the highway reservation system from chapter 2 to chapter 5, and a discussion of implementation challenges in chapter 6.
Chapter 2 is a mathematical optimization model that finds the reservation (trip scheduling) plan that minimizes the total system cost. This paper endorses the concept of imposing a capacity constraint to the highway usage by the reservation system. Chapter 3 adopted a microscopic traffic simulator (VISSIM) to conduct a proof-of-concept study, and investigated the potential benefits. The reservation scenario outperformed the baseline in terms of Vehicle-Hours-Traveled and emissions. Chapter 4 explored an auction-based implementation of the highway reservation system, using an agent-based simulation technique. Chapter 5 deals with the communication reliability of the Connected Vehicles technology, as the whole reservation system will be built on reliable Vehicle-2-Infrastructure, Infrastructure-2-Vehicle, and Vehicle-2-Vehicle communications.
This is the first systematic and comprehensive study of highway reservation system, laying a solid foundation for more detailed research over different aspects and a potential implementation.