An Emission and Weight-based Road Traffic Congestion Pricing System and Control with Consideration of Investment Worthiness

The road traffic congestion pricing system has attracted different intelligent contributions thathave addressed many real-time traffic scenarios at a toll point,unlike the flat toll system that renders parallel tollsfor every traffic condition. However, existing works on dynamic traffic congestion pricing systemsfocus entirely on the traffic parameters without taking cognizanceof the impacts of the weight of vehicles on the road. More so, despite the numerous health hazards associated with air pollution from vehicle exhaust during traffic peak hours, the effects of emissionshave not been consideredas a pivotal input to be circumvented in road toll design. In addition, many dynamic approaches for congestion pricing system often suffer some limitations due to the nonlinearity of the traffic congestion pricing problem. Therefore, a fuzzy logic-based approach to dynamic traffic congestion pricing problems,in a 1*2 traffic scenario comprising a fast lane and a slow lane,is presented. The inputs to the fuzzy inference system are the weights of vehicles, the rate of carbon dioxide emission,and the traffic density on the toll lane; the output is thecongestion price. While the universes of discourse of the inputs were determined by the cumulative probability distribution approach, the universe of discourse of the output was determined by the expert’s choice,which relies on the value of the flat toll.Simulationsresultson the MATLAB fuzzy logic toolbox for a case of Lekki Admiralty Toll Gatereveal that a traffic scenario with traffic density of 57.2 V/mile, carbon dioxide emission rate of 339 Kg/m and weight of approaching vehicle of 8860Kg, the congestion price gives N1130; this value of congestion price for this example scenario indicates an approximate value of70% return on investment (RoI) when compared to the flat toll.Investors and traffic management systemscan rely on simplicity, reduced computation cost, reduced health hazards,and justified investment worthinessin road and toll facilities.