An environmentally-friendly optimization framework for road pricing and pavement management under public-private-partnership

Vehicular emissions and the unsustainable development of transportation systems have received increasing attention in recent years. On one hand, transportation emissions increase as car ownership increases. On the other hand, construction of the new transportation infrastructure and maintenance of the existing transportation facilities are needed as travel demand increases. Thus there is a growing market for Public-Private Partnership (PPP), which aims to overcome existing deficiencies of traditional approaches while stimulating the sustainable development of transportation systems. This paper proposes an environmentally-friendly multi-objective optimization framework to derive dynamic toll pricing strategies and pavement maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) activities for road networks containing PPP projects. A case study of a road network containing toll and toll-free highways in Florida, United States is used to verify the performance of the proposed approach. The results show that the public and private sectors could coordinate their actions to guarantee profits for the private sector while alleviating negative externalities for society.