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| Toll plaza is designed for collecting tolls
in heavily travelled highways; it is however unpopular since the
motorist is hardly happy when has to wait in a long line for
paying for the tolls. The purpose of this paper is to propose
innovative toll plaza systems that are expected to minimize
motorist annoyance, and to determine the optimal number of
tollbooths in a traffic lane by cellular automata, if only one
tollbooth is expected for one lane. In our understanding, a good
system is assumed to be able to account for the interests of both
motorists and traffic managers, and to help achieve a well balance
between motorist annoyance and the optimal number of tollbooths in
a toll plaza. It is also assumed that, in a good system, the
number of vehicles congested before the toll plaza tends to equal
that of vehicles congested after the toll plaza in unit of time.
All these assumptions have been validated. It is observed that the
time gap for each vehicle passes through a toll plaza is at random
variation; whether congestions may occur at a toll plaza is
sensitive to this variable. We are then convinced that this model
is the one that adapts to its environment rather than the one that
tries to follow rigid rules. We choose for our research the
Cellular Automata, a dynamic model for space-time calculation and
discrete variables determination, because of its simplicity,
flexibility, and capability to be easily simulated; and we then
make a series of innovations to the motional rules in accordance
with practical observations. By simulating this model with a
Matlab program, we determine a close an almost optimal solution to
the problems as described above. Our findings by using the
innovated CA model as well as their significance have been
discussed in our proposal. |
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| Keywords:Tollbooths; cellular automata; traffic flow; modelling |
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