Accounting for Traffic Congestion: Heterogeneous Target Arrival Times, Uncertainty, and Monetary Incentives

This study examines the timing and extent of congestion in situations where agents with a continuous distribution of target arrival times make decisions about their departure times. In most real-world scenarios, arrival times are heterogeneous, and research that sufficiently considers both heterogeneity and uncertainty has been lacking. In this study, we formulated the real-world traffic situation as an optimisation problem that accounts for both the heterogeneity and uncertainty of arrival times in various scenarios. The results indicate that effective monetary incentives for avoiding congestion require careful pricing. Appropriately designed incentives are expected to alleviate road congestion. Policymakers can conduct a preliminarily evaluation of their impact using the approach employed in this study.