Time-of-day vehicle mileage fees for congestion mitigation and revenue generation: A simulation-based optimization method and its real-world application

•Propose an enhanced SBO approach for time-of-day VMT pricing on freeways.•Use multiple objectives for congestion mitigation and revenue generation.•Develop MFD for validation of a large-scale simulation based DTA.•Incorporate Lipschitzian optimization for metamodel tuning and exploitation.•Apply SBO to a large-scale real-world network simulated by DynusT.

Congestion pricing of a large-scale network is characterized by expensive-to-evaluate objective functions without closed forms. This paper further enhances a computationally efficient simulation-based optimization (SBO) framework to solve the problem within tight computational budget. This paper applies surrogate models to solve the optimization problem with computationally expensive objective functions based on simulation-based dynamic traffic assignment (DTA). DIRECT (a deterministic search algorithm with modification to Lipschitzian optimization) is used for metamodel parameter tuning. A trade-off of different objectives (i.e. the average travel time minimization, expected network throughput maximization, and toll revenue maximization) are converted into a single desirability function. To demonstrate the SBO framework with an application to the vehicle mileage traveled (VMT) based pricing for a real-world freeway network, this paper utilizes a calibrated simulation-based DTA model to evaluate system performance. A stochastic mesoscopic simulator is applied. We investigate the existence of an invariant macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) for the network, and compare simulated MFDs with measurements of fixed detectors and probe data. The proposed SBO framework is generic and can be used to solve other congestion pricing problems.